


Shelf Awareness

by GhostofBambi



Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: Alternate Universe - Bookstore, Alternate Universe - Coffee Shops & Cafés, Alternate Universe - Modern Setting, Alternate Universe - Muggle, F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-05-04
Updated: 2018-11-05
Packaged: 2019-04-29 01:06:03
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings, No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 3
Words: 28,418
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14461776
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/GhostofBambi/pseuds/GhostofBambi
Summary: It's too far out of her way and she's wasting so much money, but Lily can't help but return to the bookstore every weekend, where her passion for good literature has, perhaps, been unexpectedly reignited by the messy-haired, pun-making, rather handsome bloke who works there.





	1. a beginning

**Author's Note:**

  * For [alrightsnaps](https://archiveofourown.org/users/alrightsnaps/gifts), [BeeDaily](https://archiveofourown.org/users/BeeDaily/gifts).



> This was meant to be a oneshot but it got too long and I really hate letting them run over 12,000 words, so I've split it into three parts. Apologies to all of the Tumblr users who have been utterly messed around by my indecision on this front.
> 
> This work is dedicated to two awesome, beautiful, talented people - firstly, to Lily (alrightsnaps), who gave me the idea for the story and is just generally the best, and secondly, to Bee, who gets what I mean about the forearms (AKA we're both dying of thirst over here).

Lily only goes to the bookshop because of the wedding, and the gift card, and Mary in HR, who won't shut up about the place.

It's a strange jumble of events that conspire to see her there, each one disconnected from the other, yet somehow, they come together to work as one propulsive, synergistic force (Kingsley will say that it was fate, perhaps, but Kingsley is a maudlin Power Gay who bathes in good fortune and dines on solid gold success, as easily as some might breathe—she'll tell him to shut up).

First, there is Mary, and her unexplained boner for this one particular shop. She's been hounding every reader she knows to visit (it simply _must_ be seen to be believed) for a really long time. It doesn't matter that Lily can't justify taking a half-hour drive to Stamford for the purposes of buying a book when there's a perfectly good Waterstones around the corner from work. A half-hour, according to Mary, is pocket change, and Shelf Awareness is a real-world Narnia.

A nice Narnia, she claims, without eternal winters and ritualistic animal slaughter, just one employee who looks like that bloke who played Prince Caspian, only Lily's not supposed to point that out because he doesn't like it.

Then, there's the gift card, which was a present from her boyfriend. Ian hasn't met any of her colleagues yet, otherwise Lily might suspect that it was Mary who suggested it. It's more likely that he forgot about her birthday until he was halfway home from work and stopped in for a hasty panic-shop. He swears otherwise, but he's got a head like a sieve, and she's smart enough to know a last-minute purchase when she sees one.

In any case, she's got £50 to spend, and gets a chance to do so on a Saturday in April, when Beatrice—who is scoping out wedding venues while her fiancé films a travel documentary on the Trans-Siberian Express—asks Lily to go with her to Burghley House and lend her opinion. Stamford is a matter of minutes away from there, so she figures she might as well pop in and do some shopping, while she can. She's been so busy kicking ass at work that she hasn't read a decent book in ages.

She gets to the town with an hour to spare before Bea's appointment, parks near the river and swings by the shop for a gander. It's an old, timber-framed building on one of the many honey-stoned Georgian streets that make the town so desirable to tourists, and to the upper middle class, and to Joe Wright, when he filmed _Pride and Prejudice_ there. Being the working-class girl that she is—bricklayer father, nursing aide mother—she would be more inclined to scoff at the whole damn town for its visible pretensions, if that weren't her favourite movie.

Still, Lily can be contrary about these things when she wants to, and she decides, as she pushes open the door, that she's not going to love it.

She loves it immediately.

*******

It's quaint. It's old-fashioned. It's a veritable fairyland. And it sells books.

In an instant, Mary's obsession with the place becomes quite clear. Every bookshop will attain some level of perfection by default—there are _books_ present—but this one feels distinctly magical, and in a hushed, emotive kind of way.

The shop is full of light, but not the average, prosaic light of a ten-a-penny place. Pretty glass lanterns dangle from the wood-beamed ceiling, varying in size and colour, kissing the spines of neatly shelved books with unexpected shafts of red and gold and emerald. The huge stone fireplace is unlit, but draped in gorgeous creeping ivy, and houses a collection of shiny copper kettles. Two proud pewter cauldrons stand sentinel by the register, close to overflowing with colourfully-wrapped sweets.

Most diverting of all is the floor, which in its entirety is a vast, exquisitely-detailed, hand-painted map of many worlds, fictional and otherwise, and draws from her an audible gasp.

She's standing on Neverland, just a hop, skip and a jump away from the lost city of Atlantis, and it's _incredible._

"Holy shit," she says, as awestruck as to be practically silent.

Immediately, she feels ashamed of herself. This bookshop was clearly fashioned by elves and fairies, and the floor painted by the hand of an angel. She may yet find a unicorn roaming among the shelves. It deserves much better than a profane exclamation.

"First visit?"

There's a man standing at the register—not Prince Caspian, she can tell at a glance—who is roughly her age, with sandy brown hair and a tweed jacket that gives him quite the scholarly air, complete with elbow patches and a gold-and-scarlet crest. 

"Yes," she admits, "hence, my stunned expression."

"That floor is something else, isn't it?"

"It's the most beautiful thing I've ever seen," she says warmly.

"I'll pass your compliments to the artist." The scholarly man smiles at her. "Do you need any help?"

She tells him that she's here to browse for now, and he bids her to feel free, so she sets off on an adventure.

*******

There's a rolling ladder in the Classic Fiction aisle, and Lily almost loses her shit.

It's affixed to a track that runs the length of several packed-out shelves, moving freely when she pushes with the flat of her hand. She feels as if she's Belle, or something. Like she could burst into song at any moment, and none of the other customers nor the scholarly man would bat an eye.

Perched beside it is a free-standing sign that bears the notice,  _'Caution: Do not climb without adult supervision and/or appropriate health & safety training. I am 26 years-old and have fallen off twice - James.'_

She loves this place. She loves this place.  _She loves this place._ It's bricks and mortar and pure contentment.

Like other bookstores she has seen, there are placards dotted about the shelves which display handwritten reviews, though unlike those commonplace stores, most of them are bordering on ridiculous. In front of one of Paige Toon's many romance novels, she finds,  _'I hated this mushy, formulaic piece of trash, but I lost a bet and was forced to write a blurb for it, so here we all are in hell together - Sirius,'_  written in an elegant cursive, and finds the same hand has penned a more positive review  _('Drama. Romance. Cheating spouses. Those Russians knew how to live. Heavy book, great for throwing at your housemate's head. 10/10. - Sirius')_  of Tolstoy's  _Anna Karenina._

Lily wants to work at this place—to hell with her legal career—and walk this gorgeous floor every day. Scratch that, she wants to live here. Get married here. Raise her kids here.

She picks up Tolstoy, and it becomes one in an eventual stack of books, balancing precariously in her arms. Perhaps she'll throw it at Kingsley.

*******

She's rambling freely through her ink-and-paper vortex when she remembers, with a jolt, that she should have left to meet Beatrice already, so she hurries to the register and dumps all of her finds in a tumbling pile on the counter, whilst simultaneously trying to text her friend a lie about the traffic.

"I got so caught up that I totally forgot I had to be somewhere," she tells the scholarly man, while she types a one-handed message, her attention caught by her phone. "Just these, please."

 _"Just_ these?" says an amused voice. "You've practically buried the counter."

Lily looks up, and finds that the scholarly man has been replaced by another, taller and thinner, with dark-framed glasses, the cheekbones of a model and the thickest, blackest, most unfathomably windswept hair she's ever seen in her life. He grins, revealing a set of perfect teeth and one—just one—adorable dimple in his left cheek.

She's standing in magical, mystical, awe-inspiring bookshop, but the most beautiful thing in it is a bloody  _boy,_  and how is that fair?

"Where'd the other one go?" she says, feeling supplanted.

"What other one?"

"The bloke who was just here, with the elbow patches?"

"Oh, nowhere," says the very attractive guy, and picks up one of the books to scan into the register. "That's me. I'm a shape-shifter."

"Is that so?"

"Yeah, but don't tell anyone."

"And I suppose you shape-shifted your clothes, too?"

"Alright, you got me," he admits, and smooths down the front of a plain white t-shirt that works in beautiful harmony with his caramel skin and sinewy forearms. He's lean, but looks as if he could sweep her into the air, bridal style, without shedding so much as a bead of perspiration. "I'm not the same bloke—sad story—he was reading a book about black holes and got sucked in."

"Was that a pun just now?"

"Where?" he says, and looks over his shoulder to locate the source. She intends for her snort to be derisive, but that doesn't quite go to plan, and he smiles at her when he turns back around. "If you're looking for a boring explanation, the other guy's gone to the loo."

"Ah."

"More importantly, are you buying all of these for yourself, or starting a rival business?"

It's only now that he's scanning her books that Lily realises just how many she picked up, and how unlikely it is that she'll find the time to read them all. Work is far too hectic, she and Beatrice are planning her wedding together in the wake of Karl's travels, and Ian can feel more like a full-time job than a boyfriend at the best of times. It's a fine collection of books—some of which she's been dying to read for ages—but while she could have breezed through this stack as a teenager, these may just last until she's thirty.

"I've got a gift card," she replies, and raises an eyebrow. "Should you really be questioning your customers about why they're willing to buy a lot of books from you?"

"Probably not, but how else am I going to scope out competitors?"

He's so fit that she can't look him directly in the eye without a tell-tale, inconvenient, irrepressible smile that screams, 'I want to wear you like pyjamas,' which makes her feel guilty for looking in the first place—she has a boyfriend, after all, and she's never been the kind of girl to flirt about when she's with someone—so she shrugs and buries her nose in her phone while he scans in the rest of the books.

The total comes to £126.86, well above the gift card's limit and over double what she intended.

Perhaps the shop is enchanted, she thinks, watching the cashier's hands—once she's paid and he's bagging up her loot—to compel innocent shoppers to overspend. It would explain why she's felt entirely bewitched from the moment she walked through the door.

He's got lovely hands, she thinks, deft and brown and long fingered. Capable hands. Strong, perhaps.

Not a wedding ring in sight.

What is she _doing?_

Lily looks, instead, at the name badge on his chest.

"Adrian Mole?" she reads aloud. "I'm going to assume that you _don't_ share a name with a fictional diarist?"

"You'd be right," he agrees. "Why be myself when I can be Leicester's most famous failed poet-slash-divorcee-slash-celebrity offal chef? Though I _am_ pretty brilliant, to be fair."

She shoves her phone into her purse and picks up her new purchases, which he had to split into two bags. "Normally, I'd call you out for that little bit of arrogance, but I bloody love Adrian Mole, and I'd rather talk about that."

"I think they're the funniest books ever written, and I read a _lot,_ so I feel like I'd know."

"I crack up, and I mean, laugh-crying, every time I read the poems about Norway."

"Land of difficult spelling?"

"Hiding your beauty behind strange vowels," she finishes, smiling. "I was gutted when the author passed away."

"Tell me about it, I was distraught," he seconds. "You know she was working on a new one when she died, right?"

"I know! And just when he was about to finally get with Pandora!"

"Well, that's just Adrian's luck, isn't it? He spends thirty years madly in love with Pandora, _finally_ gets a chance to be with her, and his creator only goes and bloody dies," he says, and seems pleased by the laughter he elicits from her. "But look, don't let me waste your time for the sake of being polite. Didn't you say you had somewhere to be?"

"Oh, _bugger,"_ she breathes, her eyes widening. "Yes. Yes, I do. I have to go, like, ten minutes ago if I want to avoid being stabbed."

"Let me guess, you've got a mob meeting to attend to?"

"Worse than that, a very impatient bride-to-be whose fiancé pissed off on a work trip to avoid wedding planning," she says dryly, and he pulls a face in response. "Wish me luck, yeah? And thank you so much."

"Good luck," he says. "And have a nice weekend."

With a grateful smile, Lily spins on her toes and dashes off towards the exit, the magic of the place broken—almost—by her haste to get to Beatrice, and her absolute certainty that her friend is going to beat her over the head with a tasteful bridal bouquet.

"Bye, Adrian!" she calls out, as she pushes the door open with her elbow, taking the opportunity to enjoy one last look at him.

He grins at her again—in a smug, cheeky, pulse-quickening kind of way—and raises one hand in farewell. "Bye, Pandora."

Lily's heart flips over.

*******

She's in a funny mood for the rest of the day.

It's not sadness, exactly, but some distant relative of the feeling, accompanied by a healthy dose of shame, which makes very little sense from any reasonable standpoint. She didn't do anything wrong, merely feels as if she did. Three jam-packed hours of someone else's wedding plans do not help matters much.

Bookshop boy helps matters even less.

She thinks—she can't stop thinking—of his hands. Of his arms. Of the way his t-shirt hugged his shoulders. That hair, and that smile, and the way he'd looked at her when he bade her goodbye. No self-respecting woman should remember such things so clearly after just one meeting. Lily's better judgement despairs, while her traitorous, tingling flesh makes welcome. It had taken her a month to remember that Ian's eyes were blue.

The thought of her boyfriend makes her stomach twinge with guilt, and fills her with a surge of penitent affection, so she calls him when she and Beatrice return from Burghley House—trying, as she listens to the dial tone, to hold a mental picture of the soft, brown curls that droop over his forehead, despite her mind's insistent efforts to morph his face into another's—but he's in a rush to say goodbye as soon as he picks up. The match is starting soon, and he doesn't want to miss the line-up announcement, unrelenting even when she tells him that she's had a weird morning, and would really appreciate a chat.

He'll come over tonight, he promises, once he and the lads finish up at the Draper's Arms.

She tells him not to bother, because he'll only be drunk and looking for one thing.

He tells her not to be so bloody condescending, and hangs up angry, so she texts him an apology at once. He replies back,  _'K.'_

Lily is forever telling people that it suits her to the ground to be with someone so independent. They do their own thing at weekends—he has football, and golf, and the pub, and his mates, while she's usually catching up on chores that she let slide during the week—and they're not in each other's pockets, like Kingsley and his boyfriend tend to be. Her friends struggle to understand it, but as she has explained, many times, when faced with blank looks and questions that start with, "Um, not to be rude, but," what works for other people doesn't necessarily work for them.

They get along so well, mostly.

Other times, it's really fucking hard to like him.

*******

Ian comes over the next day to apologise for his behaviour during their chat. With a bunch of lilies in one hand and a frothy cappuccino—he always forgets that she prefers a simple tea, but she appreciates the gesture, all the same—in the other, he makes for a perfect model of contrition, and resolves to make amends by spending the entire day together.

It's nice, and charmingly domestic—him and her on the sofa, taking it in turns to play with Stella, Kingsley's beloved Maine Coon, ploughing through most of a season of  _Mad Men_  and laughing when Netflix judges them for watching still after several hours—and she starts to forget why she was angry in the first place. It was just a silly thing, she supposes. Every couple has them. Her mother always told her that relationships were work.

"Maybe we should spend more time together," she suggests, once their pizza has arrived, and she's consumed enough of hers to feel uncomfortably full, "at the weekends, I mean."

Ian looks at her, apparently puzzled, and hastily wipes some sauce from the corner of his mouth. "You think?"

"I do," she admits. "I mean, not  _every_  weekend—"

"Yeah. No. Yeah, 'course."

"—but every once in a while." She twists to face him on the sofa, tucking her legs beneath her bottom. "We're both so tired after work on weeknights, you know? It'd be nice to see each other without both of us falling half-asleep by 9pm."

"It would." He nods his agreement. "I miss you at weekends. And hey, footy's almost over for the season, so..."

"So, you'll shortly lose all will to live?"

"That means more Saturdays free," he continues, with a laugh. "The lads and I were talking about starting a rugby league, but I'll work something out so that I can do both."

"Sure. I mean, whatever works."

"Maybe we'll book a weekend away somewhere, yeah? Not next weekend, obviously, 'cause we've got Paul's stag do in Dublin, but some time after that. Just you and me."

"Yeah," she agrees, and she's not particularly hungry, but she reaches for another slice. "Yeah, that sounds really nice."

When he leaves—later that night because he's got an early start in the morning—she throws the lilies in the bin. They're poisonous to cats.

*******

She has no reason to go back to the bookshop—she hasn't even had a chance to start one of the novels she's bought already—and with Ian having spent every weeknight at her flat, seemingly determined to prove just how reliable a presence he can be, Lily finds herself quite pleased to be alone when he leaves for the airport on Saturday morning. She decides, in an uncharacteristic move, to spend the day relaxing, and resolves to start reading _I Capture the Castle_ right after breakfast.

And yet…

She puts a reasonable effort into reading until she bends to the inevitable, and so it’s slightly later in the day when she arrives in Stamford, telling herself that it’s fine because she feels a genuine pull towards the shop and would have come back anyway—had she never met _him—_ with none of the self-consciousness she carries in there now.

If he thinks she’s here for him…

But there’s no reason why he would, except for that which she knows to be almost, barely, closing in on—true, but her feelings aren’t projected from her chest for all to see, and her fears have roots in nothing but awareness of herself. She'll be fine. She doesn't even know the bloke. She's been with her boyfriend for close to a year, and it's perfectly acceptable to appreciate—from a distance—an attractive man. Ian is obsessed with Megan Fox, and Lily has never had an issue with it. This, in principle, is exactly the same.

It’s busier than it was last week, with a few dozen people browsing the shelves, taking photos of the floor and helping themselves to sweets from the cauldrons. One corner looks as if a children's hour has recently finished; there are squishy bean bags scattered all about, while some lingering youngsters make crayon drawings of colourful pirate ships. The Prince Caspian of whom Mary had spoken—Lily can tell immediately that it’s him—is the one manning the register today; and cuts a handsome, somewhat waxy figure, with a number of leather straps tied around his skinny wrists, tattooed arms, and long black hair pulled into a silky ponytail.

Her guy—Adrian, or whatever his real name is—isn't there. Not as far as she can see.

She can't tell if she's relieved or disappointed.

*******

It looks as if a fresh batch of reviews have been added to the shelves, and Lily decides to conduct a treasure hunt of those which have been hitherto unseen. She traverses a slow, meandering path through the store, moving up and down the rows in a precise and orderly manner, pausing often to stop and read, and laugh, and read again—until she rounds a corner between Westeros and Camelot, and almost collides with him.

"Oh.” She turns as red as a poppy in bloom and takes a sideways step to cut around him. "Sorry."

He'll have forgotten her, she thinks. He must see so many customers in a week; her features will have blurred into an unsteady memory.

“Hey!” he says, spinning on one foot as she passes by. “I knew you'd come back to see me!”

He looks as thrilled by her presence as she is by his, and isn't that a shameful state of affairs? Lily should make her excuses and leave, but it's like he’s cast an invisible line out to sea and snagged her dress, catching her neatly on the end of his hook; she turns around to face him before common sense can catch up with her body to remind her that it’s not a good idea.

“Actually," she retorts, "I only came back for the floor."

"You and the floor have something going on, do you?"

"The floor and I are exclusive, as it happens.”

“Funny, because it never mentioned anything to me.”

"You assume it tells you everything."

"This floor and I go way back, I'll have you know," he says grandly. "Plus, I know the artist personally."

"Do they work here?"

"Sort of. He owns the place, so he's more of an all-seeing, omnipresent entity than an employee," he explains. "Think Wizard of Oz, but less of a hack—"

"—and more of a cartographer?"

"He prefers 'artistic genius,' but that's a fair assessment," he says, smiling at her in a way that makes her feel like her secrets aren't her own. "He'll be very happy to hear how much you like it."

"He will?"

"Oh, definitely," he agrees. "In fact—totally unrelated point—he told me to tell you that you look especially fit today."

That catches her in an uncomfortable crosshair between jubilation and guilt, two forces battling for dominance, and she hesitates for a moment before saying, with an apologetic wince, "I actually have a boyfriend, so..."

"Oh." His eyes widen slightly. "Did you think I was—no, don't worry about that," he says, and laughs, and doesn't seem too bothered. "That was a sales technique."

His quip saves them both from something desperately awkward, and she's saved herself from danger. She mirrors his laughter. "A sales technique?"

"I'm a salesman," he says simply. "A salesman sells. It's what I do. Dunno if you've noticed, but I'm quite a looker myself—"

"If you say so."

"—and I find that a little bit of charm here and there encourages people to dig a little deeper into their pockets."

"I'll remind you now that I had already committed to buying far more books than was necessary last week, before I even knew you existed."

"You did, that's true, but think of how many you'll buy today."

"If only I were made of money," she sighs, "alas, I'm not a wealthy baroness, merely a person who has to work their ass off to pay their bills."

"What do you do for work," he says, one hand combing through his dishevelled hair, "when you're not breezing in here and breaking my heart?"

"I thought that was just a sales pitch?"

He shrugs. "I'm an unreliable narrator. What's your job?"

She knows—being so pale and so decidedly redheaded—that she can't hide a blush to save her life, so she breaks eye contact, dropping her gaze to linger on another review card that sits quite neatly between their two bodies.

"Something boring," she says, and touches the placard with her index finger. A laugh bubbles up from her chest. "This person is mad."

"What?"

"Him," she clarifies, and taps the placard with her fingernail. "Every single review I've seen from this person is like, 'not enough cats,' or 'cats weren't accurately represented,' or 'sorely disappointed by the lack of cats in _Android Application Development for Dummies,'"_ she quotes, recalling a few of the blurbs she's seen around the place. "Then this one just says, 'title misleading.'"

"The title _is_ misleading," he counters.

"How so?"

"Well, I've got a cat named Algernon, yeah?" he begins, and Lily splutters out another laugh at once. "So I picked up this book thinking, brilliant, finally, some feline representation in the literary world, but the Algernon in the book is a bloody mouse!"

"So you're James, are you?"

"That's what it says on my birth certificate."

"Which makes you the same bloke who keeps falling off the ladder?"

"I fell off the ladder _twice—"_

"Twice is one time too many to get a pass."

"I'll tell you what," he counters, with his head cocked to the side, "how about _you_ try climbing that ladder when you've had three double espressos and your mate's just spun you round for thirty seconds, and see if you can stay upright, tough guy."

"Tough guy?!"

"I said what I said," he replies, feigning loftiness, as a dark-haired girl in a lemon yellow dress appears from the other end of the aisle and comes to a halt next to him.

"Sirius says can you help me get the box of mid-year diaries from the stock room?" she says, tossing her ponytail over her shoulder. "I tried doing it myself, but they weigh about a tonne."

"Yeah, it's fine, I'll get them myself," he says, then points to Lily. "Francesca, can you give... er, what was your name, again?"

"Lily."

"That's a nice name."

Somehow, the presence of a third person makes Lily feel exposed, as if she caught them snogging against the bookshelves, rather than having a perfectly cordial conversation. She is acutely aware that her face is glowing. "So is yours."

For a moment, he looks as if he might say something else, then he clears his throat and nods to his colleague.

"Fran," he says, in a firm, professional tone that he seems to have pulled from nowhere, "can you tell Sirius that Lily can have whatever she wants at half-price? Consider it an apology," he adds, looking at Lily again. "Trying to ask girls out on the shop floor is generally frowned upon."

"Oh," she says, a thrill shuddering through her spine, as disconcerting as her tone is flippant. "I mean, if it's going to get me discounted books, you can ask me out whenever you fancy."

 _"Don't_ tempt me," he warns her, backing down the aisle, bouncing lightly on the balls of his feet, quick and grinning and gorgeous. "I'll see you around, yeah?"

"Yeah," she agrees, and gives a half-hearted wave, "see you around."

Then he disappears from her line of sight, leaving her and his colleague in a silent, vaguely awkward stand-off.

"Did he really ask you out?" says Francesca, after a very long moment, staring at the space he's just vacated. "Seriously?"

"Well, not _really..."_

"But he just said—"

"It was more of an, um—more of a flirty, jokey kind of thing," Lily explains. "It's not as big a deal as he made out."

But her cheeks are burning, and her heart is pounding in a way she isn't used to—in a way it never beats with Ian, or with anyone she's ever met before—and this should be absolutely nothing at all, but it feels so _big_ , and she can't understand why.

It feels so natural, being around him. Like she's known him for a really long time.

But it shouldn't, and it can't. She has a boyfriend, and has done for a year, and what is she supposed to do now? Dump him for the whisper of a chance with a total stranger just because he thinks she's fit? Discard a year of effort and hard work because she thinks she might have _feelings?_

Coming here again was a terrible idea.

"You are _so_ lucky," Francesca tells her, with an unexpected burst of longing.

'Lucky' isn't quite the word that Lily would apply to this situation.

Trouble.

She thinks she might be in trouble.


	2. a middle

Lily gets home from the bookshop in time for Kingsley to take her to Turtle Bay for Caribbean food and rum cocktails, finishes her book—albeit, with a slight buzz on—before midnight, and goes to bed at peace with the world and everyone in it.

It is possible that she overreacted in her handling of a newfound desire to slam an innocent bookstore employee up against a shelf of biographies—there's a kink she didn't know she had—and shag him senseless, which is ridiculous, really. At least, that's what Kingsley says. He doesn't 'do' drama, he does hypnosis tapes, and breathing exercises, and a weekly bamboo massage with Vivien at the spa. He prides himself on remaining zen, though he will occasionally venture towards a dry, bitter, eye-rolling nihilism that needs to be kept in check. If he says she's being dramatic, he's probably right.

Trust her to get all in a tizzy over a stupid crush, when it probably happens to most people at least once, but she can and must do better. She's not a feeble side-character in an American teen drama, falling to pieces all over the place. She can handle being attracted to a good-looking man.

She'll just stay away from the shop. It's a simple solution.

It's extreme, perhaps, but popping into a bookshop that's thirty minutes out of her way just to eye up some bloke is like keeping chocolate in the fridge when one is dieting; temptation she doesn't want or need. She's not keen on the idea of feeling a guilt she doesn't deserve every time she claps eyes on him, two flirty conversations don't provide sufficient grounds to end a year-long relationship, and she'd never cheat, so there's no other option. The story of them is done and dusted. Lily can't miss what she never had.

Even if he  _did_  make it clear that he fancies her, too.

But it's fine. Her only real reason to go there in the first place was her gift card, and she's used that up. If she needs any more books—aside from the twelve she's bought in the past fortnight—she can use the bloody library. There are loads of them in Peterborough. It'll save her the money.

Though of course, she hasn't been able to go back to the library in The Cresset since she returned  _Animal Farm_  a week late and almost died of shame. Kingsley said she was a nutter for being so embarrassed, but Kingsley has never appreciated the sanctity of literature.

If she was single, she'd have asked James out herself and gone to town on him, but alas, it's not to be.

Or not alas, because she's with Ian and he's a good egg, and he's going to try harder to make their time together a priority.

This is fine.

She's in a good mood when she gets to work on Monday, parking up at her desk with her thermos flask of tea and a newly-minted copy of  _Starter for 10_  in her handbag for her lunch hour. That's the upside to all of this; she's got a brand-new stack of books to peruse, and can finally get cracking on her resolution to get more reading done. Ian will be back from Dublin tonight and has promised to come over, so she's planning a lovely meal for two, and in the words of Starship, nothing's gonna stop her now.

But she makes the mistake of telling Mary where she's been the past two Saturdays.

*******

They're in the staff kitchen preparing their respective lunches—a takeaway kebab box for Mary, and last night's chicken curry for Lily, which is whirring away in the microwave—chatting about how much they like the decor of the shop, and she hasn't mentioned James at all, when seven lethal words conspire to seal her fate, and his—and Ian's, for that matter—though Lily hardly knows that yet.

"You should come to the book club."

"What book club?"

"It meets in the shop every second Wednesday," Mary rattles off, with the chipper tone of a radio advertisement. "There's free food and drink, and somebody always bakes something."

"Since when did you go to a book club?"

"Since ages ago."

"At Shelf Awareness?"

"Yeah, I'm sure I've told you about it. Remus—that's the bloke who runs it—is literally the sweetest person I've ever met, and there are a few wanky book snobs, but everyone else is lovely." Mary points her teaspoon at Lily's face. "We can carpool there from work to save money on fuel."

"I can't go to a book club on Wednesday nights," says Lily flatly.

"Why not?"

"Because..." There's no clever way to say that she's so hot for one of the shop's employees that she's already thought about him in the shower several times, one of which resulted in Kingsley banging on the door to remind her that she'd been in there a full forty-five minutes. Her housemate has spent the weekend ribbing her, and has decided to drive to the bookstore after the gym tomorrow morning just to take a look at James. "Ian always comes over after work on Wednesdays."

"So? He comes over every weeknight."

"Yeah, but Wednesdays are like..." She trails off for a moment, "busy."

Perhaps she sounds enigmatic, but the truth is, she's unable to think of a lie to cover the reality, which is that Ian usually fires up Netflix and falls asleep on her sofa while she's washing the dinner dishes. 

"Please tell me it's not a sex night," says Mary, scrunching up her nose. "You two aren't like that Flight of the Conchords song, are you?"

"No!"

"Then what's the big deal? You've been saying for ages that you wanted something to do on the weeknights that isn't sitting around with Ian watching telly, plus, it's incentive to read more. This is killing two birds with one stone."

"You mean, killing two birds with one  _club?"_

"Don't make puns," says Mary coldly. "Ian won't mind losing you for one night. Even better, this might make him spend a bloody weekend with you, for once."

The janky, ancient, microwave—which might, Lily suspects, eventually explode in a burst of flame and flying meatballs—dings, and she yanks the door open to remove her meal. "Actually, we  _will_  be spending more time together at weekends, once the football season's over."

"You mean, when the football season's over and World Cup season starts, and he has to watch every single match because god forbid he misses one and his Neanderthal mates take his man card away?"

"That's unnecessarily mean."

"You knew I was mean when I made you my friend."

"Besides, the World Cup doesn't even last that long."

"And we're biting our tongue," says Mary lightly, and sweeps from the room with her box swinging haphazardly from one hand, making a pincer-like motion towards her open mouth with the fingers of the other. "Biting, biting, biting."

Lily rolls her eyes and grabs a fork from the sideboard, then follows Mary into the break room.

"You can say whatever you like," she tells her, "but the bottom line is, I can't go to the book club."

"You can," says Mary, "plus, you have to. I already emailed Remus before lunch and gave him your name."

"Who's Remus?" They sit down at an empty table, next to the wall, which is plastered in blurry, printed photos of 'The Boyz' from the office on various work nights out that both women make a strident point to avoid. "James doesn't go, does he?"

"Remus works at the shop. You'll know him if you've seen him—he dresses like a professor."

"Elbow patch guy?"

"That's the one." She takes a bite of her kebab. "Which one is James?"

"Tall guy? Black hair? Glasses? Sort of..." Yummy. "Overconfident?"

Mary frowns while chews her food and considers this description. "I don't think he goes, no. Or maybe, like, once or twice. I can't really remember."

"Doesn't matter," says Lily firmly. "I still can't make the time."

"You can though."

"I can't," she insists, and shakes her head to emphasise her point. "I mean it."

She doesn't even believe herself.

*******

Wednesday is a mixed bag of the good, the bad and the truly inconvenient, starting with Ian, who mustn't have been paying attention to what she was saying the night before, because he swings by her flat that evening with his gym bag and his usual story about how he's half-starved because he had to work through lunch, which is his usual way of asking her to cook without looking like an arsehole.

He thinks she doesn't know this, but she does. He thinks she doesn't know that he did have lunch, but she does, because he leaves a crumpled McDonald's receipt on her coffee table when he dumps out the contents of his back pockets.

Lily wouldn't mind being asked directly on an average day. She's a bloody good cook, and she can always refuse. The problem is that he turns up right as she's about to leave, which leads to a prolonged scene in which she tries to explain that she told him where she was going yesterday and Ian insists—long after it becomes clear to them both that Lily is right to claim that he simply wasn't listening—that he's  _sure_ she never mentioned a book club. It's an awkward, vaguely passive-aggressive stand-off without the stand-off, but eventually she leaves him in her living room with Kingsley for company, and sets off for Stamford with her promise to Mary hanging over her head.

To make things worse, or better (or truly inconvenient), James is there, chatting to a small group of people around Lily's age with a slight frown on his face, but he's all smiles as soon as he sees her walk in, and glides over to greet her like a figure skater in a black sweater and well-worn jeans.

"It's you again!" he announces, and skids to an abrupt halt in front of her. "Hey!"

"Hey!" she echoes brightly. She is weak. She is  _so_ weak. "It's me again!"

"It's Lily, right? I never remember names, but I saw yours on the attendee list and thought, 'Surely it's not the  _same_ Lily? Surely she's not  _so_ obsessed with me that she'd stalk me at book club?' But it seems I was wrong, and here you are."

Luckily for her blushing face, she's distracted from his surpassing gorgeousness—and his worryingly effective flirting game—by what's going on south of his ankles. "Are you wearing wheelie trainers?"

"Yup," he says proudly.

"Why?"

"For fun and dexterity."

"I didn't know they made them for adults."

"Oh, they don't, but I'm pretty good at getting what I want."

"That's an ominous statement to make, if I'm honest."

"Isn't it, though?" She's not looking at his face, but can see that he's shoved his hands in his pockets. "Thing is, it's totally true. I was a spoiled brat growing up. My nickname was Veruca Salt."

"Didn't Veruca Salt wind up in a trash chute?"

"That, also, happened frequently," he explains, and she looks up at him, meets his gaze, and they both laugh; him in soft, half-bashful kind of way, while his eyes rake over her face as if to savour her reaction, her in a way that emits far too many pheromones for her liking.

Why, she wonders, does any eye contact between them feel like a precursor to sex?

"I think my friend Mary's supposed to be here?" she asks, attempting to steer the conversation away from anything that has potential to become cute or flirtatious. "Dunno if you know her, she's a bit taller than me, dark-haired, lovely Scottish accent?"

"Yeah, I know her," says James. "Mardy Mary? Always likes to be angry about something? She'll probably be along soon."

"She's the one who told me about the club in the first place."

"So, I was right. You  _are_ here for the book club."

"Excellent deduction, Holmes. I'm haven't just come to get lost in your eyes," she retorts, instantly failing in her own mission. Weak. Far too weak, "though it's one of my top two priorities."

"You think you'll get another discount if I ask you out again, don't you?"

"Actually, I was hoping to push you far enough to start getting stuff for free."

"You think you can trick me with your face and your hair and your blatant honesty," he says, and makes as if he's turning his back on her to storm away, "but James Potter's mother didn't raise a fool."

"James Potter never asked me out in the first place," she reminds him, "fool."

"You're right, I didn't!" he agrees, and spins around on his wheels with perfect balance. "Go out with me?"

"Can't."

"Boyfriend's still knocking about, is he?"

She shrugs. "No major relationship status changes in the last five days."

"Thought so, but at least I've earned you that discount," he quips, and tosses a glance over his shoulder, where the group of people he was talking to when she walked in are watching them curiously. "I should probably go and explain to that lot why I ran off suddenly, and  _you_ should probably talk to Remus." He points at the scholarly man from her first visit, who is manning a table leaden with biscuits, milk, hot water canisters and Styrofoam cups. "He'll take you through how everything works."

"Sick of me already, are you?"

"Of you?" He places a hand on his heart as if she's wounded him. "Never, but you know how other people are. They can get very jealous, and I wouldn't want you making enemies on your first day here."

"If this is your level of confidence when you've just been rejected, I can't imagine what you're like when you  _do_ get a yes."

"Irrepressible optimism is my greatest strength," he tells her, and rolls backward on his wheeled feet, "that and my hair, really."

She's left with no other option but to shake her head at him in an exaggerated, faux-exasperated manner, as if he's a terribly bothersome boy and not a magnet—with admittedly brilliant hair—from whom she can't seem to detach herself.

Mary will figure it out immediately. She's made no secret of her distaste for Ian since last year's Christmas party, when Lily turned up in a terrible mood after an argument, got drunk and told her all about it, breaking her own rule about discussing her relationship issues with her partner and her partner only. She's going to realise that Lily has feelings for James, and she's going to tease her about it, and pester her, and it's going to make her life at work a daily migraine.

For now, though, there's someone she needs to speak to, and as Kingsley has reminded her recently, there's no need to make a whole song and dance out of this thing with James. Mary might not even notice, if Lily is cool about it.

She approaches the refreshment table, and Remus, who greets her with a welcoming smile.

"Hi," she says, with a short wave. "I'm the new girl."

"Nice to see you again," he replies. "You're Mary's friend, aren't you?"

"The one and only."

"She's usually here on time, I expect she won't be too much longer," he says. "Coffee or tea?"

"Tea, please. Coffee and I have never gotten along."

While Remus is making her a drink, Lily looks over her shoulder at James, who is zooming backwards past a table stacked with books that bears the sign  _Books to make you look intelligent on public transport,_  and watches him until he turns his head in her direction, at which point she hurriedly looks away and realises that Remus has seen the whole thing.

"What does the owner think of him whizzing around on those shoes?" she asks, trying to sound as if her interest in James is born purely out of concern for his safety.

"Oh, the owner’s never around," Remus tells her, passing her a cup of tea. "I think I’ve seen him a grand total of three or four times since I started working here. He leaves James in charge, for the most part, hence the shoes."

"So he's the manager here?"

Remus nods. "If you've seen anything around the shop you thought was fun, it was probably his idea."

"So, the silly reviews?"

"That was him."

"And the cauldrons?"

"Bought them himself."

"But he hasn't filled the place with cats yet?"

"Not yet, but put the idea in his head and he'll probably do it."

She pauses to consider this prospect for a moment. "I mean, personally, I think the only thing better than a bookshop would be a bookshop overrun with cats, so you wouldn't see me complaining."

"You're one of those, are you?" he says, with a laugh. "James is going to love you."

That's a nice idea, she thinks, and that's the bloody problem.

*******

Ian is lying on her sofa when she gets home, half-watching some action movie with two empty Chinese food containers on the floor next to him.

A tub of half-eaten sweet and sour sauce is leaving a ring on her coffee table.

Normally, she would say something—she's the first to admit that she can be anal retentive about cleanliness—but she's had a really fun night and wants to keep her good mood going. Even though she didn't have a chance to read the book they were discussing and mostly observed in silence, she had a great time at the club. Mary was right, aside from one bloke named Edwin who sat twitching on the edge of his chair, permanently poised to launch into an agitated, quasi-condescending debate with anyone who doesn't agree with his assessment of the story's central theme, and another girl named Helena who seemed to be there purely to flirt, everyone else present was nice and welcoming, and mostly on her level. Even if she did incur a lot of jealous looks from Francesca, who is quite obviously smitten with James.

Sirius—the tattooed Prince Caspian lookalike—particularly enjoys provoking Edwin to argue in what seems to be a deliberate attempt to wind him up that flies over his head. Mary gets her kicks out of putting the snobs in their place. Remus moderates the discussion and veers the conversation away from anything that might cause a genuine argument. It's a friendly, well-oiled machine they've got running.

James makes everybody laugh.

He spent a lot of time looking at her, and smiled at her a lot, and looked especially pleased when—as Remus was running through a surprising list of 'about you' questions to integrate her into to the group, something else that Mary neglected to mention when she hyped it up—Lily named cats as one of the three things she loved most in the world. He had caught her eye and she'd blushed, and Mary had noticed, just as Lily knew she would.

She'll suffer for that at work, but as James caught up with her before she left and personally enquired as to whether she'd be coming to the next meeting, Lily can't bring herself to care much at the minute.

"You took longer than I thought," Ian tells her, as she places her handbag down on her desk. It's not an accusation, merely a bald fact. He was probably startled awake when she came in.

"It's a two-hour meeting," she replies, eyeing the containers. There were plenty of snacks and treats at the club, but as Ian had texted to tell her he was getting Chinese, she'd neglected to partake to save her appetite. "Where's my food?"

"Oh, shit, sorry, I didn't get you any," he says, and twists around so he's lying on his front, looking up at her with contrition in his light blue eyes. "I assumed you'd get something on the road."

"Oh."

"I'm sorry, love, I can run out and buy you something now, if you want."

"That's okay, I'm not that hungry," she says, with a smile, and turns to go into the kitchen. "I'll make myself something small."

Once away from him, Lily reminds herself that the annoyance she feels creeping into her gut is unwarranted, and he doesn't deserve a snarky comment. She shouldn't have inferred from his text that he was getting food for both of them, and she knows he would have bought her whatever she wanted if she'd only given the word.

He could have asked, though, instead of just assuming. She would have done that for him.

"Did you meet anyone you liked at your library thing?" he calls out, while she's getting a tin of beans from the cupboard and vaguely contemplating a fish-finger sandwich.

She thinks of James—and his exquisite hair, and the way he smiled at her all night—and lies to her boyfriend. "Nah."

*******

"So, what do you think of coffee?" says James, and leans backwards against a bookshelf with his hands shoved into his pockets, having apparently materialised out of thin air while she was scanning the shelves for something that might catch her eye, aside from him, which is a given.

It's yet another Saturday spent alone at the bookshop, a full five weeks from the day they first met, and he, and his forearms, are looking damn fine today in a red plaid shirt with his sleeves pushed up to his elbows—which has to be a deliberate attempt to stir up inhuman thirsts within her person, for he _must_ know that his arms are those of a bronze statue made flesh, and he's _clearly_ seen her ogling him when he carries heavy boxes, his muscles stretched and taut from all the strain.

That's far too much thought for any one person to put into any two forearms, but Lily can't exactly control what parts of him she longs to bite.

She's given up pretending to avoid the place, and goes at least once a week outside of book club. They talk at length every time she's there, and she's learned a lot about him, not least that they like a lot of the same authors, that they were born two months apart, and that even though his wheelie shoes are much too big for her, he'll let her try them on and lead her around the shop with her hands in his.

She's made friends with the others, too, even helped Remus—who also lives in Peterborough—pick out a new sofa in DFS, but James is... different. There's a mutual understanding, something fast and easy and instinctual, between them. She doesn't know where it came from, but she can't really pretend that it doesn't exist.

"Shouldn't you be working?" she says, with a raised eyebrow. She asks this question every time.

"This  _is_ work," he says, "in a sense."

"In that case, I don't think of coffee if I can help it. I'm a tea girl," she replies, brandishing a recently published Tana French. "This is the sixth in the series, but I haven't read the fifth one and I can't find it here."

"No problem, I'll order it in for you later."

"Thank you," She replaces the book on the shelf and regards him curiously, "and why are you asking about coffee?"

"Owner's thinking of opening a café."

"Where?"

"Here," he says, and points toward the ceiling. "The attic's been gathering dust for years—it's well spooky—but there's loads of space up there, so we've been told to gather opinions from our best-looking customers."

She snorts. "That was the brief, was it? Your best-looking customers?"

"It might have been 'most valued,' now that I think of it, but the way I see it, they're one and the same," he explains, and gestures towards her with one hand. "Beautiful people draw other people in."

"In that case, surely, you're more than enough to fill this place with hundreds of customers, all by yourself?"

"While that's true, my influence is limited by my gender, so I'd rather just keep you around."

She knows that he can tell how much she likes it when he flirts, but she makes a show of sighing and putting her hands on her hips anyway.  _"James."_

He mimics her stance.  _"Lily."_

"You don't—stop that," she orders, and swats at him, and he drops his arms, laughing. "You know that you don't need a café to keep me coming back. I love this place."

"Oh, right, yeah, because of 'the floor,'" he says dryly, and makes quote marks with his fingers, "not because of me at all, but wouldn't you love it  _more_ if there was a café?"

"You've reached your flirting quota for the day," she warns him.

"Okay, I'll be a good boy," he promises. "Seriously, though, this whole project lives and dies by our customers, so what do you think?"

"I think it's a good idea."

"That's it?"

"Well, obviously a bookstore crossed with a café is a wonderful idea in theory, but I don't have any other information. Like, are you going to partner with Costa or something, or—"

"Nah," James interrupts, scratching the back of his head, "he wants to do something unique. No corporations."

"Well, see, the lack of The Man's involvement means I'm liking this idea more and more."

"Don't you  _work_  in corporate law?"

"Shut up," she tells him, and he laughs. "You're going to have a theme, right?"

"What?"

"I mean, you have to. Look at this place. Opening a bog-standard coffee shop upstairs isn't going to fit with what you're going for down here."

"And what do you think we're going for down here?"

"I dunno," she says, "fun? An escape? An adventure? Magic?"

"Magic?"

"That should be your theme, you know. You've already got the cauldrons."

"So says the corporate solicitor."

"Maybe that means that I know what I'm talking about," she grandly replies. "You said it was spooky up there, right?"

"There's a definite haunted house vibe, yeah."

"You should tell the owner to play on that," Lily instructs him, "assuming he ever comes in, which he mustn't, otherwise you'd be in trouble for standing here talking to me, instead of getting on with work."

"Oh, I'm not working now."

"You're not?"

"Clocked off ten minutes ago," he says, and shoots a cheeky smile at her, "but I couldn't leave without giving you my weekly recommendation."

She tries—and quite predictably, fails—to look pained by this strange, yet hopelessly endearing, new game of his. "If this is another pun—"

"No, you'll like this one!" he insists. "It's not a pun, I promise."

"I don't believe you."

"That lack of trust is exactly why you and I never made it, you know."

"Made it where?"

"No time for that. Have you read that book about Stockholm Syndrome?"

"I don't ev—you're exhausting," she tells him, and sighs. "What book about Stockholm Syndrome?"

"I hated it at first," he says, grinning widely from ear-to-ear, "but I loved it by the end."

She hits him with a copy of  _Murder on the Orient Express._

*******

"I'll just ask the ball-and-chain," says Ian, on a night in mid-June, and laughs, and lowers the phone from his ear. "Lily, the lads are having a darts tourney at the pub. You don't mind if I shoot over, do you?"

Thus begins their biggest argument yet.

Lily isn't even supposed to be there. She's supposed to be at book club, but Ian pleaded with her— _pleaded,_  as if he hadn't seen the sun in weeks—to spend the night at home with him. Work has been busy, and the promise he made to give up weekends for her has long petered out after one or two feeble attempts, and he misses her, and wouldn't a nice night in together be so much better than driving to Stamford after a long day at work?

It's not as if she could have disagreed out loud, and her attachment to James, in particular, leaves her just guilty enough to submit to his request, but now he's thrown her kindness in her face.

She tosses her tea towel down on the counter—she's been drying the dishes after finishing dinner—and turns to face him with the utmost incredulity in her eyes.

"Are you  _serious?"_

"What?"

"You asked me to stay home from book club today so we could spend time together, and now you're going to the pub?"

Ian lifts his phone to his ear and says, "I'll call you back, mate," then seems nonplussed when he puts the phone down, entirely taken aback by her expression. Lily normally doesn't arrive at anger so quickly. Losing her temper is a journey on a normal day, a slow escalation from one level to the next. "We've already had dinner—"

"Oh, so, what, you're done for the day?"

"It's just an hour playing darts, Lil."

"As opposed to a book club I get to go to only twice a month, which is apparently fine for me to miss, but  _darts_  are a really pressing issue?"

"I've spent the last three hours with you," he points out. "I just wanted to hop out to the pub for an hour, you can come with me if you want."

"I don't want to come with you. I didn't  _want_ to miss book club, I did it because you bloody begged—"

"Because I've barely seen you recently!"

"Whose fault is that?!" she cries, and now she's raising her voice, which she hates, because their walls are thin and Carly next door is an overworked paediatric nurse who spends most of her time at home trying to catch up on sleep. "I asked you to make more time at weekends and you said you would, but  _no,_  you've got a rugby league, and football, and that's all well and good for you but woe betide I find one bloody hobby outside of cooking dinner for you and cleaning up after the mess you leave in my flat!"

"Oh, so now this is about me making a mess in your flat?"

"It's about you expecting me to make time for you whenever it suits you, when you never—"

"Do you have  _any_  idea how tiring my job is?" he fires back, because he can't respond to her allegations of neglect—she knows he can't, because he knows they're true—so he's trying to veer the fight towards an arena where he feels he'll have more power. "I'm working balls-to-the-wall every fucking day, driving from here to Grantham and back twice a day in rush hour traffic, so pardon me if I don't have the energy to cook and clean!"

"I'm a bloody  _solicitor!"_  she squeaks. "What do you think I'm doing all day at work, painting my nails?"

And it all devolves from there, until there's nothing left for Lily to do but kick him out or cry, which she almost does, inciting the deep-set need most men possess to not see their girlfriends cry. Ian instantly makes a big show of announcing that he won't go to the pub after all, if it upsets her that much, but Lily has reached the point where she can't stand the sight of him—the  _audacity_  of him, to plead with her to give up her night for him, but toss her on the scrapheap as soon as he gets a better offer—and tells him to get out of her flat.

When he goes, muttering curses under his breath and slamming her door behind him, tears  _do_  spill out, and her chest is wracked with the typical, adrenaline-fuelled heave of an argument that cuts to the bone, but her predominant feeling is relief, because she didn't want him here tonight. She wanted to go to Stamford. She wanted to discuss  _A Thousand Splendid Suns_  because she has a lot of thoughts about it. She wanted to see James, and make him laugh, and linger after the meeting the way she's taken to doing, just her and him and whichever of his mates is cleaning up the shop with him. That's the part she likes best, anyway.

If she left now, she could make it for the end, just in time to apologise.

She's acting crazy, she thinks. Nobody else would do that. A normal person would arrive at the next meeting with some kind of excuse, and everyone would think no more of it. All she'd accomplish by turning up now is a demonstration of her stubbornly persistent feelings.

He probably doesn't even care that she hasn't come.

But she  _really_  wants to see him.

She invites Beatrice over instead.

*******

"Do you ever think about other men?"

"Depends," Kingsley replies, with his eyes fixed on the television. The glass of malbec he's holding looks comically small in his mammoth hand. "Which one of us are you talking to?"

"Both of you," says Lily, "either of you. I'm not fussed."

They're watching one of the  _Twilight_  films—not that they're fans—because Beatrice has agreed to sleep over in the spare room, and they have a long-standing tradition of getting smashed on wine that's far too fancy for the occasion, and mocking terrible movies, that dates back to their teens, of which Kingsley is a passionate fan. Lily is usually an active, enthusiastic participant in such shenanigans, but her argument with Ian is fresh in her mind, and she's feeling less than her witty best tonight.

"How many  _fucking_  family meetings do these people need to have because of this girl?" says Beatrice, curled up in a ball in the corner of the sofa on the other side of Kingsley, her lip curling in disgust. "Surely at some point, they've got to realise that they're better off letting someone kill the miserable cow and be done with it?"

"That's not the answer Lil was looking for, love."

Beatrice tears her gaze away from the telly and looks at them both. "What?"

"She wants to know if we think about other men," says Kingsley simply, "sexually."

"Oh."

"Not sexually, necessarily," says Lily quickly, "just in general, like, say you met someone at work, or—"

"I think about Michael B. Jordan twelve times a day," Kingsley interrupts.

"Wakanda forever," said Beatrice dully, swirling her wine around in her glass.

"No, I'm not talking about famous men, I'm talking about men you meet in real life."

"Well, yeah, I suppose," says Beatrice. "If I see a fit bloke in Starbucks, I'm probably going to notice."

"No but, I'm talking about more than just noticing someone, that's totally normal. I know that being in a relationship doesn't mean you can't appreciate people for purely aesthetic reasons—"

"In English, please," says Kingsley.

"Shut up," she scolds him, and leans forward to pick up her glass from the coffee table, where she and King are both playing a precarious game of near misses with their feet. "What I meant to say is; are there ever times when you're with another bloke, like a friend, or something, and you think, 'oh God, I'd rather be with him than with the person I'm actually dating because the person I'm actually dating is a selfish fuckhead who doesn't get me at all, and what if this other person is The One because he's smart and gorgeous and makes me laugh,' like, just in that moment?"

Beatrice looks at Kingsley with a wide-eyed, pointed expression, as if to communicate something that Lily's not allowed to know, then shrugs. "No."

"Really?"

"Like I said, I notice fit guys, and I  _look_  at fit guys, but I'm happy with Karl, so it doesn't go beyond that."

"And you?" says Lily to Kingsley. "Do you ever feel an urge to be with someone else?"

"Isaac is all I need," he proudly replies, holding up his glass as if in salute, "unless Michael B. Jordan makes  _his_  intentions known, in which case—actually, no. Isaac is all I need."

"Cool. Thanks. I feel super reassured," she mutters, and turns her attention back to the television, trying to look like it was a question of no real importance to her to begin with. "Cool."

"Why'd you ask?"

"It's fine. It's nothing," she lies. "I've just never thought that  _this—"_  She points to the lovers onscreen "—was particularly realistic."

Kingsley makes a noise in his throat which seems to indicate that he doesn't believe her, but Lily doesn't rise to the bait.

It feels as if she's pressed the mute button on the room—she can tell by the way her friends are looking at each other that they think something is up—but she stares resolutely at the telly, tracing the rim of her glass with her finger, until both become preoccupied by the movie once again.

Alas, peace and quiet are naught but fleeting fancies.

"Is this about that bookstore guy?" says Kingsley suddenly, after fifteen relatively quiet minutes. His voice is louder than he probably intended, cutting through the silence with unnecessary force and quite unsuited to the wistful, breathy staring that the two actors on screen are currently engaged in.

Beatrice's head whips around like a cat sensing its prey nearby. "Bookstore guy?"

"Lily's obsessed with a bookstore guy, didn't she tell you?"

She's horrified to find herself blushing. "No, I'm not!"

"Yes, you are."

"When did I  _ever_  say that I was obsess—"

"You didn't, but you fancy him, and you talk about him all the time."

"She's never mentioned him to me once!" Beatrice cries, looking more scandalised than the situation calls for. "Who  _is_  he? When did this all start?"

"Nothing started—"

"Couple of months ago now."

"A couple of  _months?!"_

"He's always flirting with her and telling her she's pretty," Kingsley promptly supplies, "and he's a huge dork about books."

"Brilliant," says Beatrice firmly, as if she's heard all she needs to assess the situation. "Marry him."

_"What?!"_

Kingsley shrugs, a surprisingly dainty movement for such a huge man. "I second that opinion."

"First of all, you've never even met the guy, just watched him creepily from behind a bookshelf," Lily reminds him, twisting to fix them both with a look that King likes to refer to as, 'the wrath of mother,' and holds out her finger to indicate her point. "Secondly—" Another finger joins the first. "I don't even fancy him that much. Thirdly, I already  _have_  a boyfriend and I'm  _trying_  to work on improving our relationship, or didn't you remember?"

"You don't have a boyfriend," Beatrice scoffs, and drains the rest of her wine, "you have a human football."

Lily knows that she should rise up in outrage and argue that point.

She doesn't.

*******

Later that night, she's already asleep when Ian—drunk and unsteady—lets himself into the flat with her spare key and wakes her up by stumbling into her room with all the silent delicacy of a rampaging sledgehammer. She watches him struggle to undress from bed with her covers pulled up to her chin, spies his favourite rugby shirt sail carelessly through the air and land a foot clear of her laundry basket, and turns her back on him when he slips in beside her.

He must have forgotten their disagreement after his fifth Corona of the night, because he rolls over and plants a wet kiss on her neck. His hand creeps over her thigh beneath the covers; clumsy fingers prodding, groping blindly for the obvious. His half-cocked erection is pressed against her backside.

"Hello, you," he purrs in her ear. "Missed you tonight."

He smells of whatever pub he and his mates were drinking in all evening, a rancid reminder of that which he finds more important than her. When they're alone together, she's his girlfriend, but with his friends, he likens her to a set of shackles.

Lily wants no part of him tonight.

She's cradling a hard, unyielding kind of anger, one that spares no room for her own guilt, because she's trying so bloody hard to make things work, to not be that girl who heartlessly gives up on her relationship just because she met somebody better at the wrong time—she won't be one of those people who trade up, like their current partner is an ageing car—but Ian doesn't seem to give a shit about her efforts. He doesn't try at all. He has no idea how it feels to be in her position, constantly worried that she is a terrible, selfish, broken person because she can't help how she feels about another man, even if she has no intention of acting on her wishes when she's in his presence.

She wants him to go home, but it's not worth getting into an argument at this hour. He's too trashed to be reasonable, and Kingsley will spring into defensive mode if he feels that Lily is in any way endangered, even if the worst thing Ian can do is scream drunkenly in her face.

She shuffles away from him, closer to the edge of her bed. "I'm too tired."

"We never have sex anymore," he spits into the darkness, words ejected from his lips like a poison dart as he flips onto his back, and there's a deafening silence, short and cold, but he's asleep within a minute.

What makes her the angriest—and she has any number of reasons to be furious at this moment—is that he dared to wake her up, though it's with a heady rush of shame that she recalls precisely why.

She'd been dreaming about James. 

*******

_"'Cause I am your laaaaddyyyyyyyyyy—"_

"Oh my god."

_"And you are my maaaaannnnnn—"_

"I don't understand what's happening."

"I'm singing— _ever you reach for me, I'll do all that I caaaannnnn!"_

"James—"

 _"We're heading for somethinnnnngggggg!"_  he bellows, and Lily starts to laugh, prompting him to stop warbling along with the song and glare at her in a terrible imitation of offence. "Why are you laughing at Céline?"

"I'm not laughing at Céline!" she cries, and protectively pats the car stereo. "I love Céline, I'm laughing at  _you."_  

"You're the one listening to—" He presses the home button on her phone, which is sitting in its car cradle, and reads what's on the screen. "—romance playlist five?" He pulls a face at her. "What, because four's not enough? You have to have a fifth in case you happen across a long-haired bloke in the street with his shirt billowing in the wind?"

If she had known he'd be in her car that night, she wouldn't have had that stupid playlist set to play as soon as she started the engine.

But he was hungry, and his car's in the garage because of a faulty gearbox that needs fixing, and she'd heard herself offering to take him for a fast food drive-thru—the least romantic meal she could think of in a pinch—before she even knew what she was saying.

Now, here he is, sitting on the passenger side of her little Corsa as if he's belonged there since the day the car was rolled out of whatever factory it started its life in, thoroughly enjoying that stupid playlist while they zip towards the nearest McDonald's.

"First of all, I like an equal number of songs on each playlist," she delicately begins. "Second of all, romance encompasses a lot of different moods. It can be sad, it can be happy, it can—"

"Is there a romance playlist six?"

"I'm not going to dignify that with a response."

"I bet there's a romance playlist six," he says, reaching for her phone. She takes one hand off the wheel to slap at his fingers, and he laughs at her. "I can't believe you've been a sap this whole time, but you never bloody told me."

"You're the one who knows all the words to  _The Power of Love!"_  she protests, though she knows them too, and would have been singing her heart out, were he not in the car with her.

"'Course I do, I'm a huge sap, but I'm not afraid to admit it."

"Oh, please, I bet you say that to all the girls."

"What girls?" he says, with another laugh. "The only woman I hang out with on the regular is my mum, and  _her_  favourite thing to do is complain about the lack of girls in my life."

"Is she one of those 'impatiently waiting for grandchildren' mums?"

"I've reckon I've got about two good years left in me before she takes matters into her own hands," says James. "Never meet her, she'd  _love_  you, which means she'd have us married off to one another before either of us knew what was happening."

"What happens to Ian in this scenario?"

"Ian's your boyfriend?"

For a moment—and quite a fortuitous one, as she's had to stop the car for a moment as she waits for a vehicle somewhere up ahead to make a turn—she's completely taken aback by this question. "Have I never mentioned his name before?"

He looks at her sideways, and shrugs. "No."

"Oh," she says, blinking. "Well, yeah, he is. What'd she do about him?"

"She'd have him taken care of."

"What? Like, find him another girlfriend?"

"No, I mean he'd disappear and turn up six months from now floating in the French Riviera. My mum knows people."

"Sirius is not people."

"Don't go assuming my mum is like me. She has a vast network of spies in her employ, watching in the shadows."

"Your mother sounds like an interesting woman," she remarks, as they pull into the McDonald's car park and line up behind the other cars in the queue for the drive-thru, "or Lord Varys. Either way, interesting."

"She's pretty unique, all right," says James. He's combing his fingers through his own hair, gazing out the window at one of the brightly-lit advertisements with a somewhat absent expression. "D'you think you'll marry him?"

"What, Ian?"

"Yeah."

"No."

He looks at her immediately. "Really?"

She'd be lying if she said she gave her answer without thinking, but doesn't want to elaborate on it now—it's just one word, but there's far too much disappointment and resentment and confusion to unpack behind it, and it's something, she supposes, she should really talk about with Ian first—so she shrugs one shoulder. "Do  _you_  want to get married one day?"

"Absolutely, yeah, I want to get married," he says immediately, and warmly, and in a way that makes something small inside her ache, "and so do you, even if you're going to be coy and pretend you've never really thought about it."

"How'd you make that?"

"Six playlists full of love songs," he reminds her, and taps her phone. "The true hallmark of a hopeless romantic. Don't even pretend I'm not right."

"I do  _not_  have six playlists full of love songs," she doggedly insists, then turns her head to look out of the driver-side window, tipping her nose daintily into the air. "I have nine."

He's still laughing at her when they collect their food at the window.

*******

Ten weeks have passed since the day she first walked into the bookshop.

Ian's promise to book a couple's weekend away has never borne fruit, and she knows by now that it probably never will.

She and James have become friends, somehow, but it's an incomplete, secretive thing, as if they're standing on opposite sides of a room, staring resolutely at a line drawn down the middle and unable to cross from either side.

They're Facebook friends, but they've never exchanged numbers. He doesn't 'like' her photos or comment on her posts, and she treats his profile with the same lack of attention, but he'll bring them up in the shop, and she'll tell him how much his status from three days ago made her laugh while she was at work. They chat on Messenger, but only ever about the books they're reading, and in a tone that's markedly different to the easy, flirty repartee of their flesh-and-blood selves. Even Ian, who Lily caught looking through her messages while he thought she was cooking in the kitchen, saw no cause for concern with James. He was more worried about Remus, for whom she made the mistake of including a hug emoji at the end of a text.

That invasion of her privacy caused another banger of a row and a frosty silence of three solid days, though it was hard for her to feel as righteous as she would have, perhaps, had she not been harbouring feelings for another friend that were growing harder to repress by the day. Were her own relationship not starting to make less and less sense. If the thought of James seeing somebody else didn't feel like being socked in the gut.

And the line in the room grows bolder, until one day, she finds herself prodding it with her toe.

It's early July, and an otherwise typical Monday evening. For once, she's round at Ian's place, though it's the first day of Wimbledon and he had neglected to tell her that Paul and Josh were coming over to watch the match he recorded on his couch. She finds herself wedged between her boyfriend and a bloke who once got drunk and tried to grope her breast at a house party, scrolling through  _Wuthering Heights_  on her phone because she needs to have it finished before the club meets next week, except she really isn't feeling it, and she's too crotchety to focus, and wonders what James is up to at that moment. If he's working today. If he's happy. If he ever thinks of her when she's not around, the way she's thinking about him.

She likes to say his name out loud sometimes, when she's alone and feels particularly stressed, like a coping mechanism. James. It reminds her that he exists, and the reality of him is such a lovely thing to remember. James, James, James. One soft, imperceptible sigh that dissolves in the air and hurts nobody, but it makes her feel much better to do it.

When his message pops up on her phone, it feels as if he's come to rescue her.

_i know this book is meant to be powerful or whatever but i really bloody hate it. do your super brainy thing and tell me what i'm missing please_

Her relief is so great that it manifests itself in a smile that can't be mistaken for anything other than hopeless infatuation, and she has to fight to keep it off her face. It doesn't matter, though. Ian's too involved in the tennis match to notice, and she hastens to reply, lest James slip away from her too fast.

_Omg no hard same, I hate it. I always find it hard to connect with a book if the protagonists are literal garbage, and Heathcliff is the worst._

_before i read it I thought it was a romance novel but now i see that i was horribly deceived  
heathcliff needs to meet my mum. my mum would kick his arse_

_And how many narrators does one book need?_

_and why is the narrator narrating the narrator?_

_I DON'T KNOW but it's the most irritating narrative structure I've ever come across._

_and wtf is up with catherine always locking herself in her room and making herself ill when she doesn't get her way? kids are more mature than that. i am more mature than that_

_It really pisses me off that Heathcliff abuses Isabella, but even in this day and age we're supposed to believe he's a Byronic hero, like, okay, sure, let's side-sweep the abuse because he's tragic or whatever._

_i wasn't aware that it was okay to abuse women if you could pull off handsome broodiness by standing around on the moors but i guess heathcliff has paved the way_

_LMFAO_

_the woman i love is dead. should i kidnap her daughter? i guess it's fine because i look really spiffing in breeches and a cravat_

_The thought of you in breeches and a cravat is hilarious._

_you mean HANDSOME and also OVERWHELMINGLY HANDSOME_

_And the caps finally make an appearance._

_weirdly i used to date an isabella_

_You did?_

_yeah for like two years_

_Wow. I've never dated anyone for that long._

_how long have you been with your boyfriend?_

_Oh. Just over a year I suppose.  
_

_you suppose?_

_Things with him have been sort of shit for a while so I don't really like thinking about it._

_oh_  
_i'm sorry, i didn't realise_

 _I'm at his flat now. His mates are here. He didn't tell me they'd be watching tennis so I'm sitting here with nothing to do._  
_TBH I don't even know why I'm here because one of the guys who came over once tried to grope me and I've felt really uncomfortable around him ever since._

_wtf that's awful  
did you tell your boyfriend about it_

_Yeah, but they've been friends for a really long time so._  
_You know._  
_I think I might just go home._

 _or_  
_alternatively_  
_we shut up the shop an hour ago but i'm still here sorting some stuff out_  
_do you want to come over and hang out?_

He's still just a friend, technically, and there's nothing wrong with what they're doing, but she knows that she shouldn't. This isn't like grabbing a lift with a colleague, or bumping into Remus in Cowgate and deciding to get pancakes at Tamu. She feels too much for this one.

She might be falling for this one.

Then Ian roars at the telly, cracking open his third can of the day, and there’s no point to her prolonged presence in this place, or to him, or to them, or  _anything,_  and that makes her mind up for her.

_Give me half an hour._


	3. an end

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thank you to everyone who has read and reviewed this story!!! It has been a real passion project for me even though it kicked my ass at times!!

Ian doesn't ask her where she's going when she tells him that she's leaving his flat for the night.

That suits Lily just fine because she cannot and will not lie, and Ian would naturally raise objections, and she doesn't want to get into the meat of things while his mates are still hanging around. She knows what's likely to happen when they next have a chance to speak in private. She can see it looming ominously on the horizon like an unexpected deadline at work, crucial to meet but so bloody tiring to achieve, and it's fine, it's _fine,_ she's got this.

But she just... needs a minute.

A minute, or an hour.

A day, perhaps. A week or so would be helpful.

She needs enough time to get herself situated. Clear her head. Figure out what she's going to say and how she's going to say it, and if there's any way that she can navigate this whole mess without hurting someone she cares about.

In that vein, she knows that running off to see James Potter is the very last thing she should be doing. She knows that the sensible course of action is to drive herself home, immerse her tired body in a cool, relaxing shower, take several deep breaths and figure everything out by herself. If Kingsley is home, she could even let him ply her with fizzy prosecco and fancy Belgian chocolates before she inevitably passes out in her bed, only to wake up in the morning with a drummer boy pounding on her brain.

Lily tells herself this once she's climbed into her car, and is staring at her keys in her hand, poised above the ignition. Be sensible. Go home. Don't do anything that you might regret later. Go home. Go home. _Go home._

She gets to Stamford in under thirty minutes.

*******

When she pulls up in her usual parking spot by the river and sees that James is waiting for her there, leaning against the low stone wall with his hands in his pockets, Lily suffers a mild electric shock.

All at once, her palms are sweaty.

 _Knees weak, arms are heavy,_ she thinks, and a garbled, semi-hyperactive laugh bubbles out of nowhere, shuddering through her tight, tensed shoulders.

Great, James is standing right by the car and can obviously see her sniggering to herself in the driver's seat. He's going to assume—correctly—that she's unravelling at the seams.

_There's vomit on his sweater already..._

Jesus, she needs to— _Mom's spaghetti—_ she needs to stop.

Her minor wobble hasn't gone unnoticed, because James strolls over and opens her door for her, clearly under the impression that she's too busy tittering to manage the task herself.

"Alright, Evans?" he says, stooping down to peer through the door at her.

"I didn't expect a welcoming committee," she replies, opting to forgo any form of explanation because all she really has is the truth, and the truth— _I'm a little obsessed with you, want you, adore you, think I've made a monumental number of mistakes and now have no idea what I'm supposed to be doing—_ is too inappropriate for words. "Thought you'd be in the shop?"

"I wanted to get us both an ice cream cone, and I didn't think it would keep if I brought it back to the shop to wait for you," he explains, while Lily climbs out of the car, "unless you fancied licking it off my hand when it melts, but I took a wild guess and figured that wouldn't appeal."

He looks fantastic, hair a mess of soft, sooty black, his brown skin dewy in the sunlight, wearing yet another plain white tee because her life's not complicated enough already—she's convinced he knows how much she likes what those bloody t-shirts do for him—completely unaffected by a heat which has subjected everyone else in England to a sweaty, sweltering discomfort.

Lily dearly wants to lick every inch of him, but that's best kept to herself.

"I think," she says lightly, "you might have underestimated my ice cream obsession, if you think I wouldn't resort to such desperate measures."

"Have not. I've seen you inhale your fair share of strawberry sundaes. It's a truly magnificent feat that puts kids on sugar highs to shame." He cocks his head to one side, taking her in, his concern making itself known in the furrow of his brow. "How are you doing?"

She shrugs. "Been worse, been better."

"Did he give you any grief before you left?"

"Not a word, but I doubt he noticed I was leaving in the first place."

"Right," says James, and scuffs his foot against the ground. "Look, Lily, I can't exactly pretend I'm devastated to learn that your boyfriend's not Mr. Perfect, or anything—"

Lily lets out a weak wisp of a laugh.

"—but I'm really sorry that you're upset, because everything in your life _should_ be," he continues. "Perfect, that is, because you're a bloody wonder, yeah? One of my top three favourite people, easy."

A strong and pleasantly warm sensation threads its way towards the centre of her chest.

She feels as if her heart is melting, in a figurative sense, though were her fleshy mortal body not tethering her to solidity, the blistering sun which beats down on her back feels as if it could easily dissolve her skin.

"The other two being yourself and Sirius?" she replies, rather than admit how much it means that he would think of her in that way.

"Sirius and Remus, actually," he corrects her, grinning, "though there's also my mother, and my dad, and my mate Pete and my cat, and—well, yeah, now that you mention it, I'm pretty wonderful myself." He points at her. "Case in point, my master plan to cheer you up is going to be a roaring success."

"Oh yeah?" She lifts an eyebrow. "Your master plan of stuffing me with ice cream?"

"The fun only _starts_ with ice cream—there'll also be a soft drink of your choosing, plus, I will later be escorting you to the shop because I've got something cool to show you."

"Finally got around to hanging your portrait, did they?"

"No, the bastards, though I've lobbied for it for countless decades," he says, his voice low and dramatic, and she laughs. "Seriously, though, I'm excited for you to see it."

"And you won't get in trouble if I'm caught in there after hours?"

"Course not," he says, jangling his keys in his pocket. "My boss doesn't care, and besides, he owes me one. Nothing would get done in that shop if it wasn't for me."

"And Remus."

"Me and Remus, who gets to be the bigshot at book club, so he's already cashed in his favours," he swiftly concurs. "Anyway, if we get caught and there _is_ any trouble, I'll just say you're a burglar and have you taken away in disgrace."

"That would really round out my day, getting arrested."

"Wouldn't it, though? Think of the stories you could tell," he says, and lopes his arm around her shoulders. "Right, Miss Evans, how many scoops are you thinking?"

He takes her to a cute little place on the high street and buys her a cone—two scoops, one butter pecan and one cookie dough—before they head back to the shop.

Their server, Sadie, is a cheerful older lady with cat-eye spectacles and unashamed, bright pink hair who offers warm smiles and huge scoops and is everything an ice cream server ought to be. She asks them about their plans for the evening, and Lily blooms like her namesake at the idea that sweet, friendly Sadie of the generous scoops might have assumed that she and James are a couple.

The truth is, Lily wants Sadie to believe that they're a couple. She wants _people_ to believe it, to look at them and think that they're a natural fit, that together she and James make something right and whole, something that will justify the way she has been feeling. It's shallow and it's totally inappropriate, but it's there, and Lily can't help the thoughts that flit across her brain.

The walk to the shop is drenched in sunlight, a race to consume their ice creams before they melt. By the time they reach the shop and James unlocks the door, she's in a rather messy state.

"How did you get it on _both_ hands?" asks James, who devoured his ice cream quickly and remains untarnished, once they're both inside and he's taken a proper look at her.

Lily swallows her last piece of wafer cone and sends him a flat look. "Because you were talking about ice-cream hands earlier, and it jinxed me."

"You're right, it was I who caused this, not the sun," he says dryly, then his gaze drifts over to the register. "I've got some wipes back here, actually. Hang on a sec."

He walks over to the register, ducks behind it and begins to root through the various drawers and cubby holes beneath the counter.

"Why'd you have wipes behind the counter?" says Lily, approaching it from the front.

"It's a necessity. Sirius likes to eat unsuitable foods on the job."

"He's allowed to do that?"

"You try telling him to stop," he says, and springs to his feet, brandishing a baby wipe. "Hand," he instructs, and circles the counter with his arm outstretched. Lily promptly complies, resting her right hand on top of his left, so James wraps his fingers around her wrist to hold it in place, then sets about wiping the sticky residue from her fingers. "Jesus, Evans, you're sloppy."

"I'm not sloppy!"

"Did you manage to eat anything at all, or did you let the whole thing melt all over you?"

"It's your fault for keeping me talking," she retorts, but obediently presents James with her other hand when he drops the first. "I could do this myself, you know."

"I know, but I'm about to show you something really special, and I don't want your grubby little paws making anything dirty. Need to be thorough."

"Grubby little paws?!" she cries, fighting to hold back her smile. Losing spectacularly, because her hand is in his and he's doing a more thorough job than perhaps he needs to. "You've got an absolute cheek, Potter."

"Correction," he retorts, "I've got two absolute cheeks. Four if you count my backside."

"Who would?"

"You would, I've seen you looking."

"How on earth could you have seen me checking out your arse when it's permanently behind you?"

"Reflective surfaces."

"Of which there are so many in this shop?"

"Maybe I've caught you on the CCTV, you don't know my life," James offers, scrunching up the baby wipe. He tosses it on the counter and turns away from her, clasping both hands to his backside as if to keep it hidden. "Come on then, pervert, follow me and keep your eyes averted."

*******

"Is this for real?"

"No," says James. "It's an immensely sophisticated VR simulation."

Lily elbows him in the side, but there's no animosity behind the movement, and her attention is far too caught by the scene before her to give much purchase to his teasing.

"It's meant to be like a potions classroom," he explains, moving away from her, rounding a circular wooden table that sits in the centre of the room. "I think that comes across. I _hope_ that comes across." He looks up at her, his brow furrowed. "Does it come across? I've said 'come across' four times now and it's starting to sound strange."

The tables are mismatched, some circular, some square, some long and thin, but all are made from the same dark wood, roughly hewn and charmingly knotted. Their surfaces are equally different—a rusting Bunsen burner screwed down here, pestle and mortar placed cunningly there—but each one is lit from above by hanging orbs that look like crystal balls. Vials of brightly coloured liquids glow from the shelves behind the carved coffee bar, the menus are disguised to look like spellbooks, and a polished suit of armour stands proudly near the door, a jaunty wizard's hat perched atop his gleaming head.

One wall is hung with yet another map, a sprawling, gorgeous thing, clearly hand painted and aged like parchment, detailing a building Lily doesn't believe exists _—Charms Classroom, Astronomy Tower, Forbidden Forest—_ with inky black footprints spattered over the corridors and grounds.

"Yeah," she says softly, caught and amazed and enthralled, and _touched._ "It comes across."

"My mate Peter's an electrician," he continues. "He's kitted out the all tables with charging ports for laptops and phones, and we've ordered a bunch of privacy screens for customers who don't want people nosing at what they're writing, and there'll be complimentary WiFi, obviously, and instead of employee of the month, we'll have customer of the month—" He points to a cat-shaped chalkboard that is propped up on a wooden stand. "—and give out prizes to our regulars, like free drinks or pastries, something like that."

"Right," says Lily. "Right."

"I was thinking we'll have a sort of library up here, where people can grab a book and read it at their table if they fancy. Not anything from downstairs, obviously, or we'll be selling dog-eared copies, but a good enough selection, and we'll do cakes and lunches, and have specialist coffees with magical sounding names—"

She doesn't know if she wants to burst into tears or throw her arms around his neck.

Possibly both.

"—Sirius is working on that, he's good with that kind of stuff. I only think of puns, and everyone seems to hate puns," he finishes. "Though I managed to sneak a few onto the menus, and will staunchly defend them with my last dying breath."

"Puns," Lily quietly repeats, her eyes on vial of sugar which bears the label _Moonstone Dust._ "What a strange and specific hill to die on."

"And it's on that hill that I'll _take_ my last dying breath," he replies, with an easy laugh, but she can tell by the way he's been holding himself—the slightly stiff shoulders, the little crease between his brow—that some part of him is anxious, waiting for her opinion, wondering whether or not she'll approve of what she sees. "What d'you think of it, anyway? We're all pitching in to get it done, so we'd appreciate the feedback."

 _What does she think,_ he asks, as if Lily could possibly lend words to how this makes her feel.

"Honestly, James, I don't—" she begins, and offers a helpless shrug, her gaze shifting to his thin, handsome face. "I don't even know what to say."

"Is that the good or bad kind of speechless?"

"Good kind," she offers quickly. "Definitely, definitely good. Brilliant, in fact. Wonderful. Spectacular."

"Just as I suspected," he cockily drawls, visibly relieved. Utterly adorable.

"This was _my_ idea," Lily adds, now unable to keep the smile from blooming across her face. She feels light and giddy as a child. "I said to go with magic."

"I know."

"You _used_ my idea."

"Course we did. It was loads better than any of the other ideas we got and it won out in the vote, so at the risk that you might sue us for intellectual property theft—"

"As if I would!"

"Well, as a thank you, then," James amends, "for giving us the idea, and for being generally brilliant, I’ve been given clearance to offer you free drinks and food for life."

"Really?"

"Cross my heart," he says, smiling. "Even if you want fifteen muffins in one sitting."

"You think I can scarf down fifteen muffins in one sitting?"

"I think you can do whatever you set your mind to."

Lily laughs, and moves to walk among the tables, and definitely _doesn't_ allow her mind to linger on how much she knows he means it.

"You said there was a vote?" she asks, after a minuscule silence.

"Yeah," says James. "My boss likes to get the whole staff involved in decisions like this."

"So there were other ideas floating around?"

"A few others, yeah."

"And how hard did you push for _my_ particular idea, just out of curiosity?"

"Super hard," says James, "but in my defence, I'm very biased in your favour, _and_ prepared to name a sandwich after you, should the offer of free food prove insufficient."

"It's more than sufficient that you used my idea at all," she tells him, stopping to run her fingers along the smooth, carved back of a sturdy walnut chair. "Do you have _any_ idea how much I love this shop, or how happy I am that you've stamped some part of me into my favourite place in the world?"

He lets out a kind of scoff, but it's a soft, half-hearted thing. "It can't be your _favourite_ place—"

"Yes, it is," says Lily firmly. "It's beautiful and unique and fun, and—"

"And Peterborough has really terrible bookshops?"

 _And you're here,_ she cannot add. _You're here and you're everything._ "And the manager gives me mates rates on books."

"I have to, or you'd go bankrupt, with all the bloody books you buy."

"Well, you can charge me full price now, if I'm in for a life of free lunches."

"Free lunches, free drinks, cheap books—you'll pitch up a tent eventually."

"Bold of you to suggest I haven't already done it."

"I'd know if you did, I practically live here myself," he says, and strolls behind the coffee bar. "I can make you something now, if you fancy."

"Really?" She feigns a shocked expression. _"Before_ the official opening?"

"We're all stocked up already," he says, pointing to the table in front of her. The menu which sits upon it is titled _Saucy Tricks for Tricky Sorts._ "Why don't you sit yourself down right there, Miss Evans, and I can officially deem you our first ever customer."

She cocks an eyebrow at him. "Without a formal witness present?"

"It'll still be official. They'll have my word for it, and I'm scrupulously honest, except for all the times I'm not," he says, grinning at her. "I mean, you'll be a non-paying customer in perpetuity and some might think that doesn't count, but I think the point still stands."

"The crippling Irish guilt to which my mother devoted a lifetime to instilling is crying out for me to insist upon paying, but my mum's not here, so what can she do?" she chirps, taking the proffered seat. "I'd be honoured."

"That's the spirit. What d'you fancy?"

"Oh, just a—"

"I'm joking, I know you want a tea," James interrupts, as he lifts a comfortingly chunky mug from a hook above his head and tosses it lightly from one hand to the other. "Nice and strong, big splash of milk, and one sugar, unless you've already _had_ a tea with sugar today, then you switch to sweetener."

Like she's missed a step on the stairs or heard a sudden bump in the dead of night, Lily's heart gives a massive, painful thump against her ribs _._

"You'll only have hot chocolate in winter because you're a top flight lunatic, and you're not into coffee at all," James continues, as if nothing untoward has happened, as if her breath hasn't trapped itself inside her lungs. "Never have been, never will be. Tea girl, through and through."

It's such a small, insignificant thing, yet it shifts something enormous into place.

 _Clunk,_ there it goes, settling heavily in her brain, a truth she's known for a while—something she's been seeing daily in the corner of her eye, flitting around her head like an errant moth bouncing off a lightbulb, never staying still so she could properly examine it—the last, most crucial piece of a puzzle so easy, any small child could have worked it out in a day.  

Lily is not in danger of falling in love with this man. _Falling_ denotes a process she is actively embroiled in.

Lily _loves_ this man.

She loves him ardently. Helplessly. She loves him like a bloody fool.

_Already._

She has not yet broken up with Ian, yet here she is, alone with the man she loves in a cerebral dreamland she inspired, and what exactly is her plan? She can't kiss him, can't speak freely as to what is in her heart, and she certainly can't stay here—with this debilitating weight pressing down on her shoulders—and _not_ act on what she's feeling.

Lily has been pushing—testing the waters with the tips of her toes, teetering over the edge of what could reasonably be deemed acceptable—but this single, stammering moment is as far as it can go.

"I have to leave," she says blankly.

James is already standing at the hot water dispenser, poised to fill the overlarge mug and make her a cup of tea—exactly how she likes it, because he knows, _cares,_ and Ian never did—but he lowers it to the counter.

"You okay?" he asks, regarding her from beneath furrowed brows.

Lily looks down at the surface of the table.

"Yeah, I am, I just—I have to leave," she repeats, "I'm really sorry, I know this is coming out of the blue, but I don't think I should be here right now."

"Oh," says James. "I see."

She cannot see his face because she can't _look_ at his face, but his voice betrays no surprise, no hint that he's been taken aback by this, or any indication that he might be poised to ask her to change her mind.

He already knows.

Of course he does. Most likely he knew long before she did.

"I'm so sorry," she murmurs, "I'm the worst—"

"You're not the worst."

"I can't believe that's true," she says, and looks up to tell him that he'd lock the door behind her and never let her back if he had any wits about him, but he’s looking at her in a way he never has and it’s so _soft,_ projecting her own longing back towards her, and she has to leave before her heart bursts, or she does something stupid. "I want to stay, but I'm not sure if—I don't think I've been thinking clearly, but I need to go and do something. Now." She stands up so quickly that her chair almost clatters to the floor, but she hastily catches it with one hand, then turns back to him. "I have to do it now."

"Yeah," he quietly agrees, "I reckon you do."

He does not need to elaborate. This has been clear and present between them, all this time.

"You understand, don't you?"

James nods. "I think so."

"Because I didn't plan for this," Lily quickly adds. "I don't normally—this isn't _me,_ you know? It’s just… _you,_ and all of this—"

"I know," he says, with a second, more assured nod, and gestures toward her with one hand. "I know who you are, yeah? What you're about. And I didn't plan for this either, but here we are."

"Right," she sighs. "Here we are."

For a moment, they simply stare at each other in silence.

Then she picks up her purse and hoists it onto her shoulder.

"I might not be back for a while," she tells him, her voice barely registering in her own ears, "because—well, it doesn’t seem all that appropriate right away, but—"

"I know," says James, again. "I can wait a bit longer."

"No, listen, please don’t feel you have to wait at all on my account. I really don’t deserve—"

"I’m the one who gets to decide that," says James, in the firm, businesslike tone he sometimes uses when he speaks to his colleagues, "and believe me, I don’t have a choice, but if I did?" He shrugs lamely, and shoots her half a smile. "I'd do it anyway. You're worth waiting for."

Her wanting little heart melts, and a silly, joyous warmth pools across her body, seeps into her muscles and bones.

But James deserves better than what she's done to him, and some stubborn, punishing part of her brain insists that he be made to agree.

She opens her mouth. Closes it. Tries again, tries her hardest to sound stern. "James—"

"Seriously, Evans," he says, lifting a hand to stay her, "we've got the rest of our lives to argue and I'm sure you'll win nine out of ten of them, but you're not having this one. Not a bloody chance."

There's nothing that Lily can say to counter that.

He's got her. Soundly, and for as long as she lives, apparently.

She can't fight her smile, faint and exasperated as it is, nor the blinding, powerful concoction of equal parts guilt and happiness that floods her body like a dam has burst in her soul. "The rest of our lives?"

"Not to be dramatic, because you know that's not my thing," he tells her flatly, "but the next time you come back here, I'm never letting you go."

These disconnected pockets of pure, unadulterated longing keep hitting her like arrows sent from a hidden assassin.

She has to leave.

Lily has to leave _now,_ because she wants to kiss him so badly— _needs_ to kiss him like she needs sustenance to live—but throwing herself into his arms would mean an ugly black spot on her heart that she can never scrub off, and she will not be that girl, tainting herself and him by association. James likes her too much to let her be that girl. He deserves better. Ian deserves better. _She_ deserves better.

"I have to go," she says softly.

"You said that already."

"Yeah, I know, but—" She gestures towards him, expelling the thought on a deep breath. "God, James, you just—"

"I know."

"—and I'm supposed to just—"

"I know."

"Do you know _everything_ today?" she asks him, sounding huffier than she intended, which immediately prompts him to smile. "You always say I'm the one who has it all together, but I've never felt more clueless in my life and you're just—what you just _said_ was—"

"If it helps, I’ve had it rehearsed for ages," he offers, and scratches the back of his head, elbow pointing up towards the ceiling beams. "Parts of it, anyway. I wasn't sure when this was going to happen."

 _When,_ he says.

 _When,_ as if they've always been inevitable, and James has always known, and has been waiting patiently for Lily to figure it out for herself.

"You're—" she begins. "James."

"Yup. That's my name."

"You're unbelievable," she says, though she could scream, because everything she wants to say is everything she can't. "Just—just an unbelievable person, James. I've never met anyone like you in my life, and I don't—I don't deserve you, not one little bit."

"Thanks." He shoves his hands in his pockets. "For the first part, not the nonsense follow-up about what you deserve."

"Let's not argue about what I deserve."

"I mean, we could, but we've already decided that I get to win all the arguments today."

"We did," she agrees, smiling despite the awful, painful thing that she must later do. "I wish I didn't have to go."

"I always wish that, but you're right, it's for the best."

"Best for both of us," she agrees, and her whole body is crying out for her to kiss him, urging her on, mad at her for resisting, but she will not let them start a relationship with something rotten at their core, "but this is it, okay? Next time is going to be different."

He smiles at that, the faintest tugging at the corner of his mouth.

"Next time," he repeats, as if he likes the way those words sound falling from his tongue. "I'll hold you to that, Evans."

"I'm pretty set on holding myself."

"Good. Then we're sorted." He nods in the direction of the door. "Now go on, get out of here before I have to chase you with a pitchfork."

And Lily does.

She leaves—racing down the stairs, bursting into the sunlight—because that's all that's left to do, because she has to, because they've got to do this right, and she's going to _do_ right, by both of them.

The next time she sees him, she'll kiss him.

Next time.

*******

Lily feels as if she could fly back home.

She's in love.

In love. Properly in love. Madly in love. _Her._

She's in heart-stopping, life-altering, romance-novel-appropriate, standing-on-a-windswept-precipice love, with _that_ guy, not this one, and it's that freeing realisation that carries her out of the shop and straight to Ian's flat in her tired old car, flooring the accelerator whenever it's humanly and legally possible for her to do so.

Her relationship with Ian doesn't work. It never worked. She's wasted _months_ attempting to fix something that wasn't broken, just entirely non-functional from the very beginning.

She has to end this. Immediately, if not sooner.

It should have ended a long time ago.

She hasn't treated anyone fairly over the last ten weeks, least of all Ian. Least of all James. Least of all herself.

How could it be fair to subject her boyfriend to her half-hearted interest in their flagging relationship? She has never been able to admit that she hated playing second fiddle to his hobbies, his mates, and his innumerable weekend plans, and that makes her no better than he is. Lily has been sticking with a man she doesn't want for the sake of being a decent person, for the sake of fairness, wishing he had someone else's face, making excuses to avoid sex because touching him makes her feel as if she's cheating on James—who isn't her boyfriend and has never been her boyfriend, but should be, and feels as if he is.

If emotional adultery is a thing, she is absolutely guilty of it.

And Ian… must have sensed it. Somehow. Surely.

What a foolish, ignorant woman Lily has been, to push against the will of her own heart, long after it had settled on exactly what it wanted. She _belongs_ with James Potter, in every soppy, silly, mushy way she never allowed herself to believe existed, and he deserves every scrap of love she can give him, the full warmth and vibrancy of her affections, _not_ a friendship that acts as a thin cover for the truth of how she feels. She left her heart in the care of his beautiful hands from almost the minute they met. He's her Adrian, her Darcy, her Gilbert Blythe.

He’s her James.

She finds herself acting almost entirely on instinct, spurred on by a feeling of skittish impatience, doing without much conscious thought behind her efforts, knocking on Ian's door instead of using the key he gave her because she's forfeiting her right to entry and that feels only fair. He's surprised to see her when he opens the door, his rugby jersey stretched across his broad chest—he puts so much effort into keeping his bulky muscles up to scratch, hours and hours at the gym—his eyebrows lowered in a frown.

It strikes Lily, as she stares into his bright blue eyes, that she's hardly known herself since she and Ian started dating. Why has she kept with this man for such a long time, when she’s been so terribly discontent? She used to be so fearless. She used to take risks.

"You're back," he says, though it sounds more like a question than a statement.

She can hear some sporting program blaring on his massive flat screen telly in the background. Perhaps the tennis is still going. Or the World Cup. England have been doing really well.

"I am," she says. "I'm sorry. Are your mates still here?"

Ian gestures behind him into the flat. "Paul's gone home to the wife, but Josh is still—"

"I'm so sorry," she cuts him off, "and I'll tell Josh I'm sorry, but I think you should ask him to leave. We really need to—"

"Lily, what—"

"—talk," she finishes. "We need to talk."

There’s a flatness to her request, an urgency that bodes no other interpretation, and Ian _knows_ what that means, knows immediately. She can tell by the shadow that falls across his eyes, the slow downturn of his lips, the wavering note of panic in his voice when he opens his mouth to speak.

Of course he knows. This has been on the cards for months.

"No," he tells her, one hand gripping the door frame as if he's determined to break it apart beneath his fingers. "I can't just ask—it's rude to kick him out, we were going to order a pizza and I don't—you should go home." He swallows. "Go home, yeah? You're all worked up and you need to calm down. You don't want to do this now, Lil, you'll only—"

"I won't," she blurts out, which sounds cruel and shattering and makes her feel terrible, but he's wrong, she's not going to regret it, and she can't keep putting it off. "I'm sorry, Ian, I'm _so_ sorry, but I have to, we _need_ to—" Her words catch in her mouth, and she releases a heavy sigh. "Please don't make me do this in front of one of your friends."

"We can talk tomorrow."

"It can’t wait until tomorrow."

"Lily, look, I _know_ we’ve had a few fights recently—"

"Ian, please," she implores, and reaches out, resting a hand on his upper arm. "Waiting it out isn’t going to help. Just let me in and send Josh home. _Please."_

Ian shrugs off her hand like she’s burned him, clenches his jaw tight, scuffs a foot against the ground as if he’s preparing to square up for a fight…

...then his shoulders drop, and he sighs.

"Fine," he says, and sounds wretched, but he waves her inside. "Let’s bloody get this over with."

*******

The worst part of the breakup is that Ian does not agree with any of her reasoning.

Lily thought he would, that he'd also been going through the motions with the same fuzzy awareness of their inevitable end, but he thinks that their relationship _works._ He thinks there's nothing wrong or off or insurmountable between them on any fundamental level. He's been sailing across a placid, comfortable sea, perfectly content with the way things were going, and that _kills_ her. It kills her that he cannot see their disconnect, how wholly unsuited to one another they are, or how unhappy she has been, despite her _telling_ him, over and over, and in a hundred different ways.

"But I love you," he tells her, clinging desperately to her hands like she can't possibly leave if he just holds on. "I can change. I'll try harder. Weekends, trips away... whatever you need me to do to fix this. I _know_ you've felt neglected and I know that's my fault—it's _all_ my fault, I've been selfish—but I'll do so much better from now on, I promise."

She can only shake her head and tell him no.

Even if there was no James—and that's an ugly, unthinkable idea—his promises aren’t enough. Ian doesn’t really mean them, just wants to keep her from walking out the door. Wants to win, like he always does. Wants her to stay because he’d rather have a girlfriend—any girlfriend—than be alone and forced to take care of himself.

Lily wants a relationship with someone who _cares,_ who tries, who is prepared to give back what she consistently puts in. She wants effort. She wants time. She wants to be some kind of priority. And Ian could really mean it when he says he’s going to change. He could give her all of those things, and more. He could do a complete 180 and become the world’s best boyfriend, but it doesn’t matter, because she doesn’t want it from him.

She wants James. Only James. Maybe she'll never want anyone else.

It's still too early to tell, but…

Before all of that, there is this. This horrible, painful thing.

The anger comes when the begging stops, after he tries to kiss her and she jerks her head away, and it has dawned upon Ian that there is no changing her mind, that he can’t mend this wound with a hastily procured Starbucks and a bunch of pretty flowers.

"Why would you do this _now?"_ he keeps repeating, as if this is a particularly sensitive time and she should have been more mindful, even though he has been very chipper lately. "When everything is going so—just out of the blue like this?"

He has released of her hands by now, and they've wound up in the kitchen, standing several feet apart.

"It's not out of the blue," she gently argues. "You know that. I _know_ you know that. Things have been going wrong between us for a long time—"

"And whose bloody fault is that?!" he cries, throwing his hands into the air. "Christ, Lily, I'm not a mind-reader! How was I supposed to know what needed fixing if you wouldn't tell me?!"

"I did tell you," she says. "I tried telling you, so many times."

"But not—but not directly!" he splutters. Bright spots of red have appeared in his pale face. "It's all hints and comments with you, Lily, you never _once_ said you weren't happy! If you _had,_ I would've—would've—"

But he grinds to a shuddering halt, pressing his lips together.

"I asked you to spend more time with me at weekends, and you said you would, but you didn't," Lily points out. It's a difficult thing to say and say kindly. "That's only one example, and maybe I should have been clearer, but you shouldn't have to make those kinds of changes if it's really not what you want. That's not who you are and that's _fine,_ but you should be with someone who'll be happy with that, and that's not me."

He only shakes his head at her, refusing to believe it, refusing to see sense.

"I don't understand this," he says weakly. "This doesn't—no. There's something you're not telling me," he adds, his eyes scanning her face as if desperate to uncover something hidden in the depths of her eyes. _"What_ aren't you telling me?"

Lily's standing with her back to his kitchen counter, his fingers curled around the edge.

He's right, of course, but only half so. James Potter is the straw that broke the camel's back, the catalyst for this conversation, but he's not the cause. _They_ were the cause, for they are so thoroughly incompatible, and were doomed from the moment they started.

"There might—there's something," she admits, wanting to tell him, not wanting to tell him, unsure if it will make things better or worse. "But Ian, before I tell you, you have to know that it's _not_ why we're breaking up. I meant what I said, this has been a long time coming, and we—"

"There's someone else, isn't there?"

He says it so blandly, so bluntly, like he already knows.

She shouldn't be surprised, really. Catching him reading through her texts had been so strange. He'd never done that before, though perhaps it had always been in him to do it, but he simply felt that he had no need to.

"Yes."

Ian's nostrils flare.

"I knew it," he says, his voice low and hard. "It's that fucking _prick_ Remus, isn't it? I knew it as soon as—"

"No!" Lily interrupts, waving her hands abruptly. "It's not Remus, he's a friend but he's not—his name is James." She brings her hands to either side of her head, pushes them through her hair and massages her temples. "He works at the bookstore, and we're friends and—and we've been spending a lot of time together and today he made me realise that—"

"So you've been _cheating_ on me?" Ian's eyes have widened, outrage twisting his handsome features. "All this time, when you've been saying you're off to a book club, you've just been fucking some bloke who works there?"

Her insides twist at the crassness of his words, and she wants to object, say she'd never do that, that she and James aren't like that—that they're _more_ than that, because what they have could never and will never boil down to just _fucking,_ but that's a selfish, unhelpful urge, and Ian doesn't deserve to hear it.

"No," she says loudly. Firmly. "I haven't cheated. I _never_ cheated. He’s just a friend and that's all he's ever been, but—"

"But what?"

"But—I'm _so_ sorry, Ian—but he's made it clear that he has feelings for me, and I—"

"And you love him," he spits bitterly, and Lily flushes, and that's all he needs to have his suspicions confirmed. "That's what you're going to say, isn't it? That you love him? That even though I make 100K a year, own my own car and bought this flat, you're leaving me because you're in love with some bloke who works in a fucking _bookstore—"_

"Ian—"

"—like it’s not bad enough, but you couldn’t even dump me for someone better? Where’s he going to take you on dates, Lil? McDonald's? The park? Or will you just stay in and eat Pot Noodle because he can't afford to pay for you both to have a meal?"

"You know I don't care about money—"

"I bet he still lives with his mum," says Ian, really building up steam, working himself to up a height of savage jealousy. "You're leaving me for a minimum wage waster who still lives with his fucking parents, aren't you?"

Lily shrugs helplessly. None of this matters to her. It's a testament to how wrong she is for Ian that he could _think_ it matters to her, and it's baffling that he can't see that. "I honestly don't know where he lives."

"Well, that's just great, isn't it?" he hotly continues. "Here I am thinking that I'm going to marry you one day, and you're passing me up for a fucking _loser_ who can't find a real career, and— _really,_ Lily? A fucking shelf-stacker? That's what you want?"

"What I _want,"_ she snaps, her own temper spiking, "is to not be with _you_ anymore."

Whatever Ian is about to say withers and dies before it can leave his mouth.

"I’d want that even if I’d never met him," she quickly presses on, "but he just—he just sped it up, because I wasn’t happy for a long time before we met and I’m _sorry,_ Ian. I really am—sorry that I didn’t end it sooner, that I didn’t speak up more often, but you and I don’t work. We _don’t."_

Ian clamps his lip together, a muscle in his jaw twitching. For a long, protracted moment, he looks as if he’s going to cry.

"I don’t agree with you," he says quietly. Stubbornly. "I was—I was happy here."

"You were only happy because I was letting this relationship be what you wanted it to be," she explains, trying to soften her tone—he's hurting, he's entitled to react, and she can't stay mad right now, "but it wasn’t what I wanted, and neither of us deserve that. You should be with someone who wants what you want, and I know she’s out there, but she’s not me, Ian."

He makes a jerking movement with his head, but Lily doesn’t know if it’s a nod of agreement, or some minor indication that he still wants to fight her decision.

"So that’s it?" he says, after another beat of silence. "You’re done with me, and now you’re going to run off to _him,_ celebrate together because you finally shook off your inconvenient boyfriend?"

"No," she says, and feels quite tired. "I’m going to go straight home."

"Home," he listlessly repeats, as if he's realised that he'll never see her flat again. "Home."

He slumps against his kitchen wall, hands behind his back.

"I love you," he tells her, words that come out on a choked sob.

"I know," she says, and doesn't believe him, even if he believes himself, "I'm so sorry."

"And I hate you for doing this," he continues. "I really, _really_ hate you."

"I understand." She steps gently away from the counter. "Is there anything you need? A cup of tea? A coffee? Is there anything else you want me to explain?"

He shakes his head roughly. "Just leave."

She nods and shoulders her purse. Debates patting his arm before she exits the kitchen. Decides against it. "Take care of yourself, yeah?"

His chin jerks upwards. "Whatever."

"Alright, well… I'll just go."

She moves away, slinking past him, fighting the urge to start crying herself, and she's just reaching for the handle of the kitchen door when he calls out, "Lily?"

She turns around to face him, bracing for an onslaught of anger, another quick-fire round of questions, or worst of all, another breathless, desperate plea.

"Yes?"

For a moment, he says nothing, his blue eyes roving over her face as if he's trying to commit it to memory.

"I hope he deserves you," he says quietly.

She smiles at him, a tight, sad, sorry little thing.

Then she opens the door and leaves.

*******

Beatrice and Mary convene at her flat when she texts them to share the news, all geared up to validate her decision, ready to alleviate any doubts or second thoughts, except Lily has none, which gets them both enormously excited.

Not excited as Kingsley, who ignores Lily's request that he at least pretend to be restrained and has Isaac drive over with a bottle of Dom Pérignon. He joyfully pops it whilst standing on his Katherine Carnaby rug and pours out glasses for everyone—except for Lily, who conscientiously objects to celebrating the pain she inflicted upon Ian—proving beyond refute that he has officially lost his mind.

"Worth it!" he cries, when the champagne has the cheek to bubble out and spill carelessly on the viscose.

He changes his mind the next morning, when in the cold light of day, Lily finds him hunched over the rug with a soft brush and his homemade cleaning solution.

Three weeks pass.

They're three good weeks, for the most part.

Ian contacts her a handful of times, mostly angry texts, requests for explanations, and occasional apologies designed to guilt her back into his life. Then one brief, drunken voicemail in the middle of the night, during which he tells her that "Josh thinks you're a slut," puts paid to all that, apparently for good. They've unfriended each other on social media, and she left her key at his flat. He picked up the stuff he left at hers while she was at the cinema with Beatrice. Kingsley had it all ready in a box.

Lily doesn't miss him.

Upon reflection, there wasn't much of a relationship _to_ miss. She's always been without him at the weekends, and her weekday chores are practically halved. Less dishes to clean. No matted brown hair in her shower drain. No dirty rugby shirts strewn about her bedroom floor, waiting for her to pick them up and throw them in the washing machine.

It feels almost the same as before, but Lily is happier. Lighter. Feels connected to herself. And free.

She hasn’t seen James since the night she and Ian broke up, right before she ran out of the shop, and that’s okay, she hopes, because it’s only right and fair that she takes some time to decompress. It feels disrespectful, somehow, to spend a meagre five minutes discarding a year of her life. Ian was a middling boyfriend—a crappy boyfriend, really—but he still _was_ her boyfriend, and one half of a relationship that taught her several valuable lessons.

It’s good to look at things that way, she thinks. It means her time with him had meaning.

She doesn’t miss Ian, not one little bit, but _boy,_ does she miss James Potter.

Not being around him, as she so sorely wants to be, makes three weeks feel like three lifetimes, leaves her pining and mooning and staring at his Facebook photos for several blank clusters of minutes, strengthens and solidifies her all-encompassing feelings. She loves him, loves him, _loves_ him, and every day that passes only serves to further prove it.

They’re still in touch, exchanging casual messages, checking in on each other, sharing photos of memes or things they found funny, but it’s not enough—it simply can’t be—and though he knows that she and Ian are finished, Lily can sense without asking that he’s waiting for her to get up and act.

Act she must, because she knows that he's been patient, and this needs to be her move.

Act she will, because she loves him, and she's recently remembered the importance of being brave.

Act she does, on a blistering hot morning late in the month—what would otherwise be the beginning of week four—two days into a week of annual leave from her job, when she opens up her Messenger and proceeds to change both their lives.

_Are you working today?_

As messages go, it's not particularly inspiring. A sharp, witty opening line would be better, but she's far too nervous to think of something brilliant now. Simple and direct is all she's got.

It doesn't matter, in the end. As always, James answers her at once.

_does tuesday end in y? if it does i'm probably working._

_The shop can't function without you for a day?_

_i mean it tries but it only pines for me._

_Like a pine tree?_

_like a pine tree full of books, which is extra cruel because trees are used to make books so that'd be like filling a pig pen with bacon._

_First of all, you're hilarious. Second, before you go off on one of your patented bacon tangents, I have the week off work, so I thought I'd come in today and see everyone._

_everyone would love to see you because everyone told me personally that he misses you._

_I miss everyone too. A lot. In fact, I'd really like to talk to everyone about something important if possible._

_have just checked with everyone and he is willing to make time in his busy work schedule for you to talk to him about important things so please drop by whenever._

_Everyone is such a gentleman._

_only for you, evans. only for you._

*******

"Personal growth," says Sirius, as soon as Lily walks through the door.

She stops short, her feet planted squarely inside the island of Neverland, just as they were on the day she first walked in, all those weeks ago.

"Pardon?" she replies.

"You're here for James, yeah?"

The way he says it makes her feel slightly called out, and a stubborn part of her brain tells her to deny it out loud.

That would make her a liar, though, and that's not starting with her best foot forward. "Yeah."

Sirius makes a low, scoffing sound, his demeanour more suited to a nihilistic teenager than to the grown man he is, and lifts a thin, heavily tattooed arm to point towards the shop floor. "He's in Personal Growth."

"Oh."

"That's not a euphemism. He's stacking shelves—though that reminds me, use protection."

"Oh," says Lily again. "Thank you for the completely unnecessary sex-ed?"

"Happy to help," says Sirius, with a mock salute.

She wonders if she should stay and make some attempt to chat, if it would be rude to leave him there after such a perfunctory conversation, but her feet seem to propel her forwards of their own accord, into a labyrinth of books and aisles which house the man she's looking for. She does not dawdle to cast an eye over the newest set of reviews, nor does she pause to examine the floor and delight over another intricate detail that she previously failed to notice.

She doesn't have time to stop and linger. She's waited thirteen weeks for James Potter and those thirteen weeks felt unbearably long. There's no distraction so great that it could hold her attention now.

Shelf-stacker, Ian had called him.

Shelf-stacker, as if Lily cares. As if it matters. As if she hasn't devoted full hours to imagining how it would feel to quit her job as a corporate stooge and come to work in this magical place. Shelf-stacker, as if James isn't exceptionally dedicated, as if he doesn't work his fingers to the bone, as if he doesn't love his job more than Ian loves his. Shelf-stacker, as if that's a reason not to want him.

Lily had been so insulted by her ex-boyfriend's snobbery, and his cruel, jealous comments, but he's out of her life now, and it seems like nothing important.

When she rounds the corner that takes her where she was told to go, she finds him there, tidying a shelf with his back to her and humming an aimless tune beneath his breath.

"I'm looking for a book about the stupidest girl in the world," she says immediately. She'll do this at once or not at all, jump right in with both feet forward, because she's fresh out of idle time to waste. "Think you can help me?"

James turns around at the sound of her voice, his eyes falling on her face at once, and he cracks a smile so charming that it actually makes her ache.

"Nah," he replies, quick as always, "we don't stock _Fifty Shades_ on principle."

"Oh, this girl's a _much_ bigger idiot than that girl."

"So you claim, but I'm pretty sure I've read the same book and I have to respectfully disagree. The girl you're talking about is brilliantly clever."

"Would you call it brilliantly clever to stick with the wrong guy for far too long?"

"I'd call that a very human mistake, actually. She's loyal, this girl, y'know? Always tries her best."

"She was trying to give that relationship its best chance," she explains, with a faint, self-deprecating laugh, "but that was pointless, and she should have ended it ages ago so she could be with you, and she's never going to stop being sorry that she didn't."

James doesn't answer her immediately, but his eyes, now veiled and curious, linger on her face until she feels her skin begin to warm beneath his scrutiny.

"Don’t be sorry," he tells her then, and takes a step towards her, then another. "None of that matters now."

Time slows to a standstill as his hands wrap warmly around both of hers, as he tugs her towards him with a quick, stuttering start, nudges her nose with his, and the eyes behind his glasses are a complex, blazing swirl of browns and greens and golds.

"I love your eyes," she tells him, a stray, unbidden thought that leaves her lips without her permission.

James laughs quietly at that, the barest release of breath. "I love yours, too."

Then he dips his head and kisses her.

It’s a soft, sweet thing, slowly given and lovingly received, as if they might both shatter where they stand if they push any harder, as if this is happening all in a faraway dream, can’t _really_ be happening—soft, warm lips and swiftly fluttering heartbeats and fingers brushing tentatively against her waist—and they must be careful lest they break this spell, which is so little and so very much in one.

There are his lips and there are hers, and whirls of vibrant colour bursting forth behind her closed eyes, and Lily doesn’t feel as if she’s standing on her own two feet any longer. Instead, she thinks she may be sinking—sinking into relief, into madness, into love—and she could do this all day, willingly and gladly, with nothing else left to come between them except…

_Except._

Better. He deserves so much better than this.

She jerks her head abruptly away from his.

"Wait," she protests weakly, without much real conviction. "We can't just—I had a whole speech prepared!"

James takes a moment to blink at her in surprise, as if he can't believe she's pulled her mouth away from his.

"Didn't you give it already?" he says.

"No, that was like... an abridged version. I had other things to say. I had an apology, I was going to explain things. I practiced it in the car, and—"

"I don't need an apology—"

"But you _deserve_ an apology—"

"You've got nothing to be sorry about, honestly, you were trying to do the right thing—"

"—and I made so many mistakes, and I want to do this right, and—"

"Lily," James interrupts, "you know I'm very invested in this kissing business, yeah?"

"I know, and—I mean, I am _too,_ but—"

"I love you," he says firmly. "I loved you the minute I met you, which _definitely_ makes me some kind of mental—completely bloody mental, but it's true." He lets out a short, huffy kind of breath. "Do you love me?"

Happiness seems to slam right into her, a savage, heady bloodrush that leaves her stunned and woozy and electrified all at once.

"Yes," she tells him, and every second of longing, every interrupted dream, every whispered utterance of his name is packed inside one word that's far too small for a moment like this, because she could encompass oceans with affection, give him galaxies of it, verse and whisper and demonstrate her feelings in a million different ways, let her imagination run wild, if it will make him happy. "Of course I love you. I love you so much it hardly makes sense, but I still think I should—"

That, it seems, is all the assurance he needs to return to this kissing business he's quickly grown so fond of, because he swallows any further protest with his lips.

It’s different now.

Warmer. Harder.

Every heated daydream come to life in a single moment.

He’s devouring her, drinking her in, taking her whole body hostage, moaning when she threads her fingers into his deliciously soft hair and tugs, then she’s colliding with the shelf behind her back and the whole thing shudders violently—Lily thinks she might hear something _thunk_ but it’s drowned out completely by both of them, by wanting, hungry sounds which pass from her to him and back again. He's kissing her still, tastes like everything and nothing all at once, and Lily is trapped, willingly, happily, with nowhere to be but flush against him, as if he took a break from starring in her fantasies to take a quick note of exactly what they entailed, and _this_ is what it feels like to be wanted. To be loved.

Her arms wrap around his shoulders as he lifts her, letting his body hold her in place, her back scraping against the hard, unyielding edges of whatever shelf she's wedged against, her skirt bunching around her thighs as it catches, angling her body so she can feel him better between her legs, meld with him better, and if she could only _think_ for a second… but he moves his mouth to her neck and she can barely think of anything at all. He's taken her to a place where her common sense can't follow, and all there is now are his lips on her skin, and an overwhelming hunger for every single part of him, and his hand sliding up her thigh, warm and inviting, moving higher and higher still...

"Sorry to interrupt this preclude to a very nerdy porno," drawls an amused, familiar voice, "but there's been an urgent customer complaint."

James pulls away from her neck at once, short on breath while her eyes snap open, and both discover that they have been joined by Sirius, who is leaning against a bookshelf further down the aisle with his arms folded over his chest, smiling as smugly as if he were Zeus on his mountain, readying his bolts, preparing to strike terror into the lives of some unsuspecting, unfortunate sods down on Earth.

She quickly combs her fingers through her hair to neaten it, as if that's somehow going to convince Sirius that she and James were having an innocent chat when he tripped and fell against her, landing rather conveniently in the space between her legs whilst subsequently hoisting her up.

"Sirius?" says James, as if he'd completely forgotten that anyone else was in the shop.

"A very concerned old lady just stopped by the register to inform me that a couple of young hoodlums were getting amorous in Personal Growth," says Sirius, his sly smile widening as he takes in their dishevelled appearances. "She'd like to speak to whoever's in charge around here."

"Oh," says James. He seems dazed, rather than embarrassed. "Can't you handle it yourself?"

"Course I can, but you think I'd pass up an opportunity to see the two of you squirm?"

"You're a terrible mate. What've you told her?"

"I told her that I'd fetch the on-duty manager."

"The on-duty manager is quite busy getting amorous in Personal Growth," James reminds him through gritted teeth, "so if you _don't_ mind—"

"Oh, shit!" Lily cries, nerves jittering through her skin, her hands flying to James's collar, fingers tightening around the soft fabric. Her sudden outburst diverts his attention to her face. "I've gone and gotten you in trouble, haven't I?"

"Nah," says James immediately, "it's fine, you haven't—"

"I'm _so_ sorry—"

"I'm the one who kissed you—"

"Oh, _please,"_ says Sirius loudly, "that wasn't kissing, that was softcore pornography. Call it what it is, at least."

"That doesn't matter," says Lily, refusing to dignify Sirius's accusation with a response, even though he's right, and the proof is pushed up against her thigh at that very moment, and her face is most certainly turning beet red, "It's my responsibility too, I shouldn't have come while you were working—"

 _"Somebody_ was about to come while you were working," Sirius puts in.

"Yes, you should've," James counters. "You're way more important than work."

This flat, no-bullshit statement, presented in a tone that bodes no argument and makes it crystal clear that James assumed that this was obvious, sets Lily's heart to soaring, but that doesn't magically alleviate her guilt, or her fear that she's somehow derailed his job security.

"It's easy to say that now," she points out, forcing a lovesick smile into submission, "but if you get in trouble—"

"I won't get in trouble."

"But what if that woman lodges a complaint?" she pushes on, gazing up at him imploringly. "What if she took a video, or something? What if she contacts the owner—"

Sirius lets out a sharp, loud bark of laugh, and Lily's eyes dart towards him once again.

"What?" she says, somewhat huffily.

"Sorry," he replies, though he doesn't sound sorry at all, "I'm amusing myself by imagining how that conversation would go."

 _"Sirius,"_ says James warningly.

"I mean, I know you're a bit of an idiot, mate, but even you're not fool enough to sack yourself."

"Sack yourself?" Lily dumbly repeats, then blinks up at James. "Sack your—"

Oh.

_Oh._

Her mouth falls open, and her hands drop to her sides as James takes a step away from her, relieving the pressure that has been holding her up against the shelves. She slides down a couple of inches, her feet coming to rest flat against the floor.

"Surprise," says James, with a tight smile.

"You—" she begins, then stops, her mouth closing and opening again like she is a hapless goldfish circling a bowl. "You _own_ this place?"

"Technically..." James begins, then lets out a wearisome sigh, "yes, I do."

She stares in response.

"I mean, my dad owns the building," he continues, "or, actually, I own it now, because he gave it to me, but I set up the business. The business is mine."

"Ever heard of Sleekeazy?" says Sirius.

Lily nods blankly, never moving her eyes from James's face. "I use their hair masks."

"His daddy founded the company." Sirius lets out another derisive laugh. "You've been snogging a trust fund brat and you didn't even—"

"I will literally sack you on the spot if you don't leave right now," says James.

"We both know that's an empty threat."

"You've got a complaining customer to deal with."

"I wouldn't _have_ a complaining customer to deal with if you hadn't decided that Personal Growth was the perfect place to get started on foreplay—"

"You own this place?" says Lily for a second time, though louder, effectively silencing them both. "You own—" A stunningly wonderful thought occurs to her. "You _painted the floor?"_

The floor. James. _This_ floor.

Her heart is suddenly thumping even harder than before.

James shoots her a soft, abashed smile. "Caught that, did you?"

"This floor?" Lily looks down at her feet—yes, the floor is still there, still intricately beautiful, still the work of an angel, still the most wonderful thing she's ever seen—then back up to James, her eyes wide. "This floor that we're standing on right now? That was _you?"_

"What can I say?" He shrugs. "I like art."

"You like art?" she blandly repeats, and throws in a laugh for good measure. "I think this is a little more than—God, of course it was you." She clasps his face between her hands. "Of _course_ it was you—it's perfect and beautiful and amazing and _you're_ amazing, who else could it have been?

"You really like this floor, don't you?"

"I fell in love the second I saw it," she says solemnly. "I mean, then I saw _you_ and you looked even better—"

James laughs.

"—but I knew it had to have been painted by some ridiculously talented artistic genius, and obviously that could only—" She sighs, and drops her hands to his shoulders. "I'm such a dolt, James, I should've realised."

"She's just found out that you're a fucking millionaire, but she's excited because you painted the bloody floor," says Sirius, shaking his head. "Unbelievable."

"Told you I loved her for a reason," says James, wrapping his arms protectively around Lily's waist, thrilling her completely in the process. He drops his forehead to meet hers. "I'm sorry I didn't tell you before, but the thing about having money is that some people can be kind of—"

"Gold-digging?" Lily suggests.

"Yeah, exactly that, and I've gone out with a few girls who were like that, and it was...well, not great, so I try not to tell people until I've gotten to know them."

"If you don't want him at his lowly, bookstore stooge worst, you can't have him at his silver-spoon eating best," says Sirius, who is still there, and should really get the message and leave. "I think that's the official motto."

"It's just a precaution," James explains. "I was mad about you right away, but I've been wrong about girls before so I asked the guys not to tell you, just in case—well, I know now that you don't care about money—"

"I don't."

"—and I wanted to tell you for a really long time, but I felt like I couldn't, in case you thought I was using that to convince you to break up with your ex."

"Instead, he talked my bloody ear off about it," says Sirius. "I've had the patience of a saint, and he's never thanked me, not once, then he threatens to sack me just because I interrupted his morning shag—"

"He's not going to leave, is he?" says Lily quietly.

"Nothing gives Sirius more pleasure than an opportunity to be a total nuisance."

"In that case, any chance you could abuse your power and pull rank?"

James’s dark eyebrows lift slightly. "What have you got in mind?"

"I was thinking you could take the rest of the day off," she suggests, "you know, so we can talk in private, save the rest of your customers from further trauma, maybe take off all our clothes?"

She smiles at him, a soft, coy thing, and he returns it at once.

He's her James now— _finally,_ as much as she is his—and the world is a wide and wonderful place today.

"Yeah," he says, and twines their hands together, "I think I can manage that."

*******

"Passport," Lily murmurs, snatching the thin burgundy booklet from where it sits on top of her dressing table. "Pants, socks, bras—I've got my outfits packed, got my swimsuit for the spa, all of the party stuff, my coat…" She spins around, staring blankly at her bedroom wall, her nose scrunched up in concentration. "I'm forgetting something, aren't I?"

"Yup," says James from the bed. "Toothpaste."

"Toothpaste!" she cries, dramatically lifting and dropping her arms. "I forgot to get the bloody travel size!"

"Don’t worry about it, I grabbed some for you on the way here," he supplies, frowning down at the copy of _Exit West_ that sits open beneath his nose. "It's in a bag in the kitchen."

"You did?"

"Mmm." He turns a page. "Also, birth control pills. You told me to remind you to pack them."

"You're right, I did. Very crucial, those."

"Can't have you getting pregnant in France, can we?"

"Unless you're coming to France _with_ me, there's absolutely no chance of that."

"Those sleazy French bastards can impregnate with a single glance," says James darkly, and looks up, his hazel eyes locking on hers. "Also, I'd rather _not_ see you suffer debilitating period cramps because you missed a few, yeah?"

"I know, you ridiculously sweet man," she says, and slants a soft smile at him. "You always remember the one thing I forget."

He shoots an easy grin back. "That’s what makes us such a great team."

He's right—entirely right, as he so frequently is—and there aren't words enough in any lexicon to quantify how happy that makes Lily feel.

She's never known a love like this before, one where the man in her life and her arms and her bed is an equal, a teammate—her _partner,_ not her grown-up child—never knew she _could_ have a love like this, but then she wandered into a bookstore that grew from magic, and then she met James Potter.

James, who zips around on wheelie trainers and occasionally falls off ladders. James, who makes puns like they're going out of fashion, and can never be counted upon to write a serious review of any book, even his ultimate favourites. James, who has an unnecessarily large collection of Nerf guns (all of which have names) and cites Cartoon Network as his favourite TV channel.

James, who lives in a tidy flat and always has clean towels. James, who taught himself to make perfect salmon fishcakes because Lily tried and loved them in a restaurant, and insists upon doing her dishes when she cooks for him. James, who texts her, without fail, _every_ time he’s setting out to visit her flat, to ask her if there's anything she needs picking up from Waitrose.

Her James, her man, the best part of her day. He kept a tight hold on all the best parts of being a child and fused them with everything an adult needs to do in order to be useful, and productive, and a really excellent boyfriend, above all.

It's November. A soft, lazy, cinnamon-scented November.

She and James have been together a mere four months, but Lily will never want anyone else—not a hope of it, not a chance—and she's been sure of _that_ since August.

She tosses her passport in her open suitcase, moves to her bed and flops onto her back with her feet pointing towards the headboard, bouncing slightly on the mattress.

"Squish," she instructs. "Please."

James, who is lying belly down, flips the book shut and eyes her with interest. "Big squish?"

"The very biggest." She sweeps her hands along her torso. "Come on, hop to. I want the full weight of you, Potter."

James heaves himself across the bed, throwing one arm and then a leg over her body, and lowers himself until he's pressing her into her duvet—his chest against hers, their faces less than an inch apart, while his book gives them privacy by flopping to the floor—with a firm, warm pressure that comforts Lily as much as it excites her.

"How's this working for you?" he asks her, palms flat on either side of her shoulders, just in case she needs him to suddenly move off and give her air. She never does, but he says he likes to be prepared.

"Tremendously well," says Lily happily, and wraps her arms around his neck. "I'm going to miss you so much in Courchevel."

"I know, I'll miss you too. Whose bright idea was it to have Bea's hen party in bloody _France?"_

"Mine."

"I mean, whose amazing and _genius_ idea was it to have Bea's hen party in France?" James corrects. "France, where you will be for three whole days, skiing and celebrating the impending marriage of your best mate while I’m stuck here, yearning for you like an old pirate who forgot where he buried his gold—"

Lily splutters out a laugh.

 _"—not_ that you're a possession I buried," James continues, looking thoughtful, "but you're just as, if not more, precious and desirable than mounds of buried treasure."

"Reading _Treasure Island_ has had a real knock-on effect on your use of simile."

"Aye, it's true," he agrees, and Lily groans. "In fact, I might go as far as to say that I'm _hooked."_

"That's a quid for the pun jar," she says, once she's taken a second to recover from his efforts.

"What pun jar?"

"The one I've just conceived, brilliant woman that I am," she says airily, and James nuzzles her nose with his own, and her heart feels full and happy, beating in time with the twin he houses in his chest. "I reckon I'll be able to afford a flash Ferrari in about a week."

"This is flagrant greed at work. You love my puns."

"I love _you,"_ she corrects him.

"And puns are part of who I am," he retorts, like he's played the winning hand, "which means you _also_ love puns, and your jar of greed concept has been soundly defeated."

"Flawed logic, Potter."

"A victory is a victory," he says, grinning cheekily down at her. "God, you're so bloody gorgeous."

"Distraction technique?"

"Nah," he says, and brushes his lips against her forehead, "just the truth."

She slides her hands to cup his face and kisses him, drawn to James by a hunger that's surprising in its intensity—or _would_ be, if he weren't so fit, so attuned with her, so completely irresistible.

James seems to melt into her touch, her lips, her body.

Lily has given up trying to explain how he can do the things he does to her, the sensations he inspires, how the sounds he can elicit aren’t a calculated effort—made to please, to reassure, formulaic and often faked—but escape her mouth before she ever knows they’re there, because she’s lost in him, _consumed_ by him, over and over and over again. How she wants him, always, every inch of him fused with every inch of her, and how it’ll never be enough, and she’ll forever keep on wanting.

"You're wearing too many clothes," she tells him presently, following several breathless minutes.

 _"I'm_ wearing too many clothes? He pushes himself up with his arms, hovering over her, and tugs at the front of her olive green blouse. "What's this nonsense?"

"It's Primark's finest workwear."

"It's an abomination, is what it is," says James, and pops open the top button of her blouse with a careless flick of his deft brown fingers. "How am I supposed to properly devote myself"— _Pop_ goes the second button—"to satisfying the woman I love"—He shifts himself further down, casually unbuttoning as he goes—"when she insists upon being _dressed?"_

"I had to get dressed for work this morning," she murmurs, shivering when he presses his lips to her exposed stomach. "They kind of insist upon it."

"That's a very unfair policy. I can wear or not wear what I want at the shop," he says, from somewhere south of her navel.

"The joys of being your own boss."

"You're my boss."

"I am _not_ your boss."

"You are, I'll prove it." His hands are on her thighs now, pushing her skirt up, inching it towards her hips. "Tell me to get you off."

Lily giggles, squirming pleasurably at his touch. "Get me off, then," she tells him softly. "Please."

"Your wish is my command," he says, and dips his head to comply.

*******

The new shop is their baby.

Literally, _their_ baby, in every way a business possibly could be.

Lily has put her everything into the project. Her time. Her effort. Every penny of her savings. Her flat, her city, and even her job, which she finally quit a month ago, terrifying as that seemed at the time.

Now, she lives in a pretty house that overlooks the River Cam and wakes up next to James Potter every morning, snuggled up together beneath soft IKEA sheets, while Algernon splays across her stomach like she's his personal cat cushion.

James didn't need her money to open another branch, in truth. He's got a surplus of his own and was quite willing to cover her end if she so decreed, but they wanted to do this together, properly, and on as equal a footing as they could reasonably swing it.

Lily never would have felt like a real co-owner if she hadn't put her own funds in the pot.

Besides, as James likes to point out, it was her idea to expand in the first place.

Setting up a second shop in Cambridge was a brief, throwaway suggestion made one evening over dinner, but Lily didn't expect that to mean she'd wind up _living_ there. She didn't expect James to pick it up and run with it almost immediately, but she should have, because it's what he always does. The two-and-a-half years they've spent together have done nothing to diminish his enthusiasm for her thoughts. He still thinks everything she says is marvellous.

It's a very big deal, this shop. It's a much larger building, to start with—three sprawling floors in total—with a much bigger pool of potential patrons. Cambridge is a proper hub of commerce, a centre of learning, and full of posh intellectuals who like hanging around in bookstores, drinking flat whites and working on their perpetually unpublished screenplays. She and James were adamant that they didn’t want to start a chain of identical stores, that this shop needed to be different, and have heart—their baby, _their_ brainchild, not a second Shelf Awareness, magical as it is—so they've dubbed it Three Stories High.

Their signage came this morning. The top two floors are already done. Lily is officially a business owner, and that sounds so tremendously fancy.

James spent two solid months painting the floor panels, and the final lot—the ground floor lot—are due to be put down in a week. In the spirit of shaking things up, the beautiful floor in Stamford remains entirely unique. Rather than creating an imaginary map of every fictional world imaginable, he and Lily split the store into parts, giving each section their own unique design—a jigsaw puzzle of genres.

Her favourite piece of this puzzle lives in the crime section upstairs. James painted the floor to resemble a murder scene on a Cluedo board, blood spatters, scattered weapons and chalk body outline all complete. The fake bookcase that doubles as a secret door to the cookery section was Lily's idea, and everyone agrees that it really brings the theme together.

Today, they've tasked themselves with the crucial step of decorating the children's section, which naturally consists of lobbing homemade paintballs at a blank white wall.

It's a messy and surprisingly tiring job, and Lily had to take off her ring to do it, but she'd rather be throwing paint-filled water balloons about with James Potter than doing anything else with anyone else in particular.

"You're showing off," she tells him, padding across the concrete floor with a mug of coffee in hand. "May I remind you that I'm the only other person here?"

"Who else would I show off for, if not you?" he responds, and sends another paintball flying. It hits the wall with the force of a bullet and explodes in a shower of lurid orange.

"Sirius," she says flatly. "Remus, Peter, Kingsley, Beatrice, your parents, _my_ parents..."

"What's your point?"

"My point," she says, handing him his coffee, "is that you're throwing balls of paint at a wall, not pitching at a baseball game."

"Baseball's so American," he says, wrinkling his nose in distaste. He takes the drink from her, curling his paint-stained fingers around the mug rather than holding the handle. "I can't help it if I'm stronger than you, and therefore better at paintball tossing."

She lifts an eyebrow. "Oh, are you now?"

"It’s a natural physical advantage that neither of us can help. Don’t pretend it doesn't turn you on."

"You'll wind up covered in paint if you don't rein in your cheek," she warns, rather than give him yet another reason to bring up her obsession with his arms, pointing to the wicker basket that holds the rest of their paintballs. "Careful."

"Hardly a threat if I'm half-covered already."

"Perhaps, but it could always get worse."

"How could it get—wait a second." He pauses in the act of raising the mug to his lips, his eyes growing wide behind his glasses. "Do you mean—"

"No, I do not."

He pouts at her. "Spoilsport."

"Of all the places we could choose to bang, I'm not going to be party to christening the children's section with our bodily fluids."

"I was going to say, that'd be weird and wrong," he agrees, and downs a mouthful. "Thank you very much for the coffee."

"Weird and wrong," she repeats, "but you would have done it anyway."

"Of course I would have done it. When have I ever been capable of saying no to you?" He gulps down another mouthful of coffee before setting his mug down on the window ledge. "Where _should_ we do it?"

"What?"

He wiggles his eyebrows. "You've got me thinking about it now."

"I did nothing to provoke that!"

"On the contrary, you’ve been shooting me coy looks all morning," he slyly counters, with that grin of his that makes her feel a little unsteady, and almost always gets him what he wants. It's something of a tragedy that he knows how well it works. "Don’t think I’m not on to your game."

She’s blushing, because he’s not wrong.

Blushing, after thousands of kisses and innumerable hours spent cultivating an intimate knowledge of every inch of his body. James can still make her heart flutter, can still turn her insides to mush with a look, or a smile, or a brush of his hand against hers. They shared a flat for a full year before they bought the house in Cambridge, and Lily said yes—three times—when he asked her to marry him, twice before he could even finish the question, but he can _still_ make her feel as if her secret crush on him has been rumbled.

"I have no idea what you're talking about," she says, trying to save face, "but I suppose I can spare an hour of my time for such an activity. Where _haven’t_ we done it already?"

"There’s always Crime—"

"I'm not having sex at a murder scene—"

"A _fake_ murder scene!"

"Do you know how off-putting it is when you try to fit your body inside the chalk outline?"

"Well, fine, if you’re going to be a stick-in-the-mud about it," he quips. "Where else, then? We've done Cookery, Romance, Graphic Novels—"

"I think we've conquered Personal Growth at this point."

"Tell you what," says James, and approaches her, settling his hands lightly on her waist, "how about we do Travel today, and the first book that falls off a shelf is where we go on honeymoon?"

"What if the first book is a really crap country?"

"Like France?"

"I was thinking more along the lines of war-torn areas."

He shrugs. "If we get a crap country like France—"

"Or a war-torn country—"

"Or one of those, or France, we’ll just keep trying ‘til we knock out one we _do_ like."

"And what am I supposed to tell people when they ask us how we picked our destination? That we shagged our way to a final decision?"

"God, Lily." He pulls a face of disgust. "Call it 'making love' at least, you animal."

Lily throws back her head and laughs, and James pulls her close, smiling down at her as his arms band tight around her waist.

She truly loves this man.

More importantly, she _likes_ this man, and he makes liking him so easy.

"I'm very sorry," she says, tilting her nose up, a silent indication that she wishes to be kissed—and James, of course, picks up on it immediately, swooping in to press his lips to hers. "I didn't mean to offend your romantic sensibilities."

"That's quite alright, we all make mistakes, and you can make it up to me by showing up to the wedding."

"I mean, I _did_ have plans to wash my hair that day, but I love you, so I guess I can make an exception."

"Ta for that, fellow business owner," he says, moving in to kiss her once again. "I love you right back."

Business owner. Homeowner. Future wife.

Lily had a plan, once, a clear direction in which she was travelling, a flat she shared with a brilliant, more successful friend, a boyfriend who was fine but nothing more than mediocre, and a career she didn't enjoy but assumed she'd keep until retirement. It took one morning—one chance encounter, one beautifully painted floor, and one brilliantly silly man—to turn that on all its head, to send a hundred different jets of light hurtling out into space, bouncing and refracting off every shining surface, and her life now moves in an entirely different direction.

Theirs is a really lovely life, though not the one she had envisioned and never the one she would have expected, but neither had James, and look at what they've made of themselves.

It's a brilliant life, the one they've got.

Like something out of a story.


End file.
